I run vanilla Arch with niri (Wayland), Waybar and a few other tools to create a desktop environment. I didn't do any special kernel or app specific tweaks for performance.

The machine boots using 1.1 GB of memory and total disk space after installing a bunch of apps is ~10 GB. Browser, Docker, video editor, image editor, LibreOffice, OBS, VMs, a ton of CLI tools and everything you'd expect to have a fully working and usable system is there.

It's a wonderful environment on 2014 era hardware. Granted I have 16 GB of memory but it would be fine with 8 GB even when running non-trivial Docker based projects and doing 1080p video editing.

Even Silksong runs at 60 FPS with a GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) GPU. Although I splurged on a used AMD RX 480 (8 GB) to get more things to run nicely in parallel. Wayland is very picky with limited GPU VRAM, especially with NVIDIA cards.

I also run the same set up on a more modern laptop with way better hardware but things aren't much faster unless I'm very CPU bound.

Everything to get the system up and running in 1 command and 10-15 minutes is here: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice