> Any thoughts on an alternate OS

Ubuntu, Debian, Arch? (Or Endless if you want something OSTree/Flatpak-based like Fedora Silverblue.)

> with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora?

Anything not GNOME? Not being (too) snarky — GNOME uses a lot of memory, although I've read they're making some progress recently. Even KDE these days is pretty low in memory usage by default.

NixOS maybe? Don't know about memory footprint, but as a fellow fedora laptop user, I find this distro the most appealing to switch to (arch being the other option, but too high maintenance for my taste).

NixOS is interesting but certainly not the easiest migration, it's a very different way of administering your system. That said, this might be what I chose to do now.

https://getsol.us/download/ Long time arch user. Now using Solus for the last 9 months and I love it.

If you think IBM are going to keep Red Hat's commitments to Fedora or CentOS going you are in for a rude surprise.

Not sure it is time to run yet, but I enjoy using Ubuntu Mate. Xubuntu is a low mem choice as well.

As for alternate Linux distributions, I don't know how similar you want to stay to Fedora, but my current setup would surely conform to your stated requirements: Arch linux, with i3 as window manager. I use st as my terminal emulator. All together, the memory footprint is minimal, and it makes my not-all-that-low laptop specs shine far more than a heavier distribution would have.

If you want something similar to Fedora, dunno. I believe the desktop interface is a big part of the memory usage of most distributions, so unless I'm mistaken in that, wanting low memory usage as well as a nice interface is going to be difficult.

I also use this, and memory footprint is ~100MiB, mostly on the Xorg side. i3 itself + various other components is ~20MiB total.

Have you tried sway instead of i3? Any reason you've stuck to i3 with X11 instead or just no reason to change?

No reason to change. Though I might try it on one of my Orange Pi's one day. Does sway support OpenGL ES 2.0?

EDIT: Actually I probably use a few things that would need to be modified to work, like screencast recording via some custom gst-launch command, that depend on X in a non-trivial way.

Why not consider Open or NetBSD? They can make nice desktops, and OpenBSD is very friendly on laptops. And they are lighter than Fedora and perform much better. And, they use a maximally free license, but this is simply my preference. You may feel different.

I wouldn’t say that OpenBSD is friendly on laptops, especially on laptops made in the past five years or so.

I've always been told that ThinkPad should work, even relatively modern ones. Is that not true?

Yeah, Silverblue is just starting to be really nice. :/

KDE's memory footprint on boot decreased to 400MB or less.