Well futex based high performance mutex support which is 400x faster than what existed back when 4MB systems were sold. A Constraint solver that doesn’t deadlock, support for a boatload of functionality that didn’t even exist back then.

And most of the size comes from -O3 compiler optimizations that didn’t exist back then and if you build with -Os it is about 512KB of a memory footprint which is smaller than SysV out of the box on Debian. So it is snappy on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM if you go the gentoo route.

People use SystemD because it works better than what came before it and it will be replaced when something actually better shows up. No one happens to have found a generally better solution yet.

OpenRC, Gnu Shepherd, runit and S6 are available for people who like them better but don’t assume that they are generally better for someone else’s use cases until you know what they are.

22MB is too heavy???

Well S6 is lighter but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Gnu Shepherd is about the same but solid.

Or you could just use meld and a single screen makes it trivial to compare and apply differences

Why bother with desktops?

Embrace sway and exec swaymsg “layout tabbed”

Only one program on the screen at a time.

Well all Linux systems can easily be turned into routers if they have 2 or more networking ports.

All you have to do is enable routing, the firewall rules for routing internal traffic and restrictions on external traffic, and dhcp services to the internal network (assuming that you don’t have a dedicated dhcp server)

Here is an example: https://github.com/dhenkes/router

Basically any Linux router guide (for any Linux distribution) can be used with minimal translation as they are all going to be using the exact same software with virtually identical configurations.

And only one of them would not have a thousand new security vulnerabilities the same day that the source code could be seen by the bad guys.