No GUI though right?

Today's version of icewm takes around 16mb of memory, xorg will add a bit to it.

There are smaller window managers but I choose this one as an example as it gives a similar experience to the windows xp of olds.

I have done the experience on slimming as much as possible a desktop. But once you start a web browser with more than 3 tabs memory usage goes through the roof. In the end if you want a very tiny memory footprint you are kind of forced to use the web sans javascript and images. You are almost better off using links or w3m and tui apps for everything.

1GB user there. 4-5 tabs it's fine under Luakit, ZRAM (1GB virtual + 1GB physical = 2GB) and a hosts blocking file.