I use the XFCE version, it’s around 400 MB idle, fluxbox should be even less I think.

I work for a big enterprise, we have RHEL on all our Linux servers save for a few that are SuSe for SAP.

The concept of having to compile something yourself is basically foreign to me

There’s no need to, what software do you need that you can’t find on Mint repositories?

having to basically rely on a built-in app database/store to easily install apps… Kinda stinks to me, and not being able to simply download an installer from a website and having the program, whatever program, up and running reliably within a minute, the concept seems ridiculous

Having an app repository is way more secure than downloading software from random websites, it’s also way faster.

But it’s fine if you don’t like it, each person has its own preferences.

It’s most probably IBM forcing it, but yeah it’s dumb.

Fantastic news! thanks

beware NVIDIA tho:

However, Valve notes the fact that enabling hardware acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs may cause X11 to crash. As such, hardware acceleration will be disabled by default for NVIDIA systems. In addition, Valve says that DPI scaling may not work correctly when hardware acceleration is disabled.