Consider trying void. If you can live without system d, it’s quite comfy though still low on ram usage. Also, the package repos ship closer-to-latest software. Mostly you’ll get all the way there on release day with just a few relatively niche things here or there that you’ll have to wait a bit for; ime, go’s compiler is a common example; after a very annoying, though admittedly forgotten by me, bug was introduced a couple of years ago we usually only get new versions after the first bug fix has come out. Another is skim, the fzf alternative but that’s technically not seen a new version since the auto-selecting-empty-lines bug was fixed.