What are the best window managers and desktop environments which works really well with NixOS in lightweight category? And, what is the idle RAM consumption I should expect from a desktop environment or a window manager. Currently, I am using KDE Plasma 6 and it uses 1.3 GiB in idle. I have also used Hyprland which works on NixOS really well but uses kind of same I guess, I don’t remember correctly. But yeah, I was not satisfied at that time.
I think there are only three that have all the bells and whistles that most people expect: plasma, gnome shell and xfce. (Plus enlightenment, but that’s appalling for cpu use, at least currently.) Of these, xfce is usually said to use the least memory and other resources (plus I really like it).
If you don’t want all the bells and whistles then you have a complicated decision to make about what tradeoffs you want instead, and it’s a pretty personal choice.
That means Xfce4 is the one which uses least amount of memory? When I used Xfce, it was using ~750 MiB on idle, Is it okay? And recently I used Alpine with Xfce I was shocked by the memory usage, it was ~300 on idle. Can we make NixOS that lightweight?
And, how about window managers? I know dwm is the one which is best for someone who is seeking for a lightweight wm but it requires the knowledge of C, which I don’t have sadly. What are the other good lightweight wm?
Window managers are what I was thinking of when I wrote: “If you don’t want all the bells and whistles then you have a complicated decision to make about what tradeoffs you want instead, and it’s a pretty personal choice.”
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https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#List_of_window_managers
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors
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I know about their existence, at least the popular ones. I was seeking for something that integrates really well with NixOS and lightweight of course.
I’ve no idea what “integrates well” means in your mind.
If you mean “configurable declaratively”, afaik only KDE is not-well-supported (and maybe xfce?) on NixOS, every other DE/WM/compositor can be configured declaratively. So it really doesn’t matter what you pick.
Try a bunch and see 
Also, your estimate of memory usage while idle may be incorrect, see https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
As said, it’s really up to you what you want in a DE/WM/compositor; generally, lowering memory usage down to the tens of megabytes is not really the primary concern on a desktop system. Pick the one that suits your actual needs the best.
I don’t think that it’s a fruitful question on this forum beyond that.
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LxQt works quite well (running on an Aspire X3300 as I’m typing this).
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