I'll join in too - here's mine
StrangeAstronomer
You can't avoid IBM/RedHat - they contribute to the kernel and many, many other parts of Linux eg systemd. I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.
That said, voidlinux is an independent distro without systemd or snaps based on runit for init and xbps for package management. It's also a STABLE rolling release.
waybar is good
scrcpy for android connectivity; syncthing to get files to and fro android (and any other linux system)
clipman for clipboard manager
wallpaper - whatever for? with a TWM you rarely see the background
emacs - because it's life (I jest)
Can't believe no-one mentioned voidlinux yet. It's very tasty.
waypipe - yes. But also wayvnc - I've been using wayvnc for a couple of years to export a headless wayland session from a file server. FOr my sins I use vncviewer on XWayland to consume it as it still seems to be the fastest.
To imply that systemd is merely an init system is ingenuous at best and dishonest at worst - systemd is so much more than an init system, as that article mentioned. Since the article was written in 2014 systemd has grown massively in scope, even more than the author feared.
It manages DNS, home directories, system services, seat managment, cron, system logging, booting... the list is ever growing. As such many people fear it is becoming too dominant through making more and more software dependent on it. It is not atomic - it is very difficult to have just one piece of systemd as its parts are tightly integrated and inter-dependent.
One could even claim that systemd failed in it's original remit - to make startup as fast as macOS by running tasks in parallel and by deferring service startup until they are actually needed. The result has been a not very performant init system - many init systems are faster eg runit, dinit. The systemd people now claim that speed is not a design goal.
It is, however, open source and very widely adopted. Most people don't care - they just want to run their browser and word processor.
What for? Even if they have improvements in some areas, the original POSIX standard utilities will continue to be needed for script compatibility. You're not going to swap them out - at best you can add them and then you just have an additional code base to support with additional attack surface to protect.
voidlinux on my laptop (from Fedora) - why? I wanted to see what a systemd-less distro was like nowadays. I have used Linux since 1992 and Unix since 1984 so I'm used to SysVinit. What I find with voidlinux is a system I can understand easily - not that I struggle with systemd, but I felt there was just so much happening under the hood, just too clever by half. If I wanted MacOS, I'd have bought an Apple.
The packaging system on voidlinux is sooooo much faster than fedora. The really weird thing is that my battery life almost doubled. I can't explain it except to say that the laptop is much calmer than under fedora, which seems to run the fan constantly. Same workload, CPU governers, powertop tweaks etc etc - but battery life almost doubled.
The one downside is a smaller array of packages in the repositories. But since I'm happy installing from source for those few corner cases, it's no biggie.
I've left fedora on my media/file server for now as I still do some fedora packaging (mainly for sway related packages).
Link for the video?
As a general rule of thumb, I've been told that anything less than a 50% performance boost is hardly noticeable.
I've also heard (but ready to stand corrected) that mitigation costs only about 10% CPU (depending on the CPU).
I don't get out of bed for a 10% performance boost.
"64-128mb ram" is hardly "low memory"!