I hear a lot from linux users that found gtk 2 era on x11 as pretty close to perfect. I know i had run ubuntu and after boot it used far less than 1GB. The desktop experience was perhaps even slightly more polished than what we have today. Not much has fundamentally changed except the bloat and a regression on UX where they started chasing fads.

I suppose the most major change on RAM usage is electron and the bloated world of text editors and other simple apps written in electron.

Just stick XFCE on a modern minimal-ish (meaning not Ubuntu, mainly) distribution and you'll have this with modern compatibility. Debian and Fedora are both good options. If you want something more minimal as your XFCE basd, there are other options too.

I used gtk2, it was ok, but I preferred Ubuntu's Unity interface when it came out.

Gnome 3 seems similar to Unity nowadays, and it is pretty good.

I find it much easier to use than Windows or Mac, which is credit to the engineers who work on it.

it's always the browser, each tab is at least 100MB, electronjs is also a browser. the gtk or whatever is nothing before the browser

The whole linux stack got bigger though - just look at what you need now to compile stuff, cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth. gtk2 was great; GTK is now a GNOMEy-toolkit only, controlled by one main corporation. Systemd increased the bloat factor too - and also gathers age data of users now (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954).

I guess one of the few smaller things would be wayland, but this has so few features that you have to wonder why it is even used.

Yep. I still develop Gtk2 applications today. It's a very snappy and low resource usage toolkit aimed entirely at desktop computers. None of that "mobile" convergence. I suppose you could put Gtk2 applications into containers of some sort but since Gtk2 has (luckily) been left alone by GNOME for decades it's a stable target (like NES or N64 is a stable target) and there's no need for it.

Most of the bloat these days is from containers and Canonical's approach to Ubuntu since ~2014 has been very heavy on using upstream containers so they don't have to actually support their software ecosystem themselves. This has lead to severe bloat and bad graphical theming and file system access.

That's rose-tinted. I remember specifically switching to KDE because GTK apps of the day segfaulted all the time. Unfortunately KDE then screwed things up massively with Plasma (remember the universally loathed kidney bean?) and it's really only recovered recently.

And to say the desktop experience was more polished than what we have now is laughable. I remember that you couldn't have more than one application playing sound at the same time. At one point you had to manually configure Xfree86 to be aware that your mouse had a middle button. And good luck getting anything vaguely awkward like WiFi or suspend-to-ram working.

The Linux desktop is in a vastly better position now, even taking the Wayland mess into account.