I've had no broadband for 5 weeks, graphics card died on the desktop and last week the battery on my main laptop. I'd installed MX16 on my sons netbook a while back and still had the CD so I dug out my old Acer Aspire 5315 to have something to hotspot off my not so free phone! Not sure if I'd call it Debian but it seems mostly jessie, I'd not call it MX16 either though.
I removed all the non-free and contrib and installed linux-libre built fittstool and installed windowmaker and tint2. Quite interesting to see the differences between my Dragora systems, the good and the bad. I have no GTK3 or QT5 on my Dragora systems, and package ages vary from mostly much older to several much newer as I tend to build from sid sources or upstream. The same/similar desktop is using <50MB on the desktop and <70MN on my laptop. I guess that's why the great disparity? Security is great on Debian and with all work going into Dragora3 if you run D2 your pretty much on your own.
I always liked the Debian way of separation of main, contrib and non-free it made it easy to remove the packages I didn't need on a laptop I knew ran free-software. That said I believe most people just pay lip service to it's original purpose of using contrib and non-free as a last resort to get X, sound, or wifi and adding contrib and non-free to your sources.list is now sadly the defacto standard.
Private + Shared = RAM used Program
164.0 KiB + 52.0 KiB = 216.0 KiB gnome-pty-helper
184.0 KiB + 36.5 KiB = 220.5 KiB anacron
192.0 KiB + 40.0 KiB = 232.0 KiB acpid
200.0 KiB + 41.0 KiB = 241.0 KiB atd
208.0 KiB + 45.5 KiB = 253.5 KiB acpi_fakekeyd
272.0 KiB + 63.5 KiB = 335.5 KiB init
236.0 KiB + 151.0 KiB = 387.0 KiB fittstool
320.0 KiB + 111.0 KiB = 431.0 KiB cron
480.0 KiB + 98.5 KiB = 578.5 KiB cgmanager
528.0 KiB + 51.5 KiB = 579.5 KiB rpc.idmapd
564.0 KiB + 24.5 KiB = 588.5 KiB ssh-agent
460.0 KiB + 227.0 KiB = 687.0 KiB rpcbind
500.0 KiB + 352.5 KiB = 852.5 KiB su
656.0 KiB + 222.0 KiB = 878.0 KiB rpc.statd
616.0 KiB + 302.0 KiB = 918.0 KiB dbus-launch (2)
824.0 KiB + 106.0 KiB = 930.0 KiB systemd-logind
344.0 KiB + 624.5 KiB = 968.5 KiB avahi-daemon (2)
1.1 MiB + 152.5 KiB = 1.2 MiB sshd
1.1 MiB + 185.5 KiB = 1.3 MiB bluetoothd
872.0 KiB + 472.0 KiB = 1.3 MiB getty (6)
1.2 MiB + 402.5 KiB = 1.6 MiB ntpd
984.0 KiB + 668.5 KiB = 1.6 MiB gvfsd
1.5 MiB + 95.0 KiB = 1.6 MiB rsyslogd
1.6 MiB + 105.0 KiB = 1.7 MiB udevd
960.0 KiB + 1.0 MiB = 2.0 MiB cups-browsed
1.3 MiB + 724.0 KiB = 2.1 MiB dbus-daemon (3)
1.2 MiB + 956.0 KiB = 2.2 MiB gvfsd-fuse
2.0 MiB + 244.5 KiB = 2.2 MiB wpa_supplicant
1.5 MiB + 1.0 MiB = 2.5 MiB cupsd
3.2 MiB + 36.0 KiB = 3.2 MiB haveged
2.6 MiB + 1.9 MiB = 4.5 MiB tint2
2.4 MiB + 2.2 MiB = 4.6 MiB lightdm (2)
3.8 MiB + 1.3 MiB = 5.1 MiB bash (2)
4.2 MiB + 2.1 MiB = 6.3 MiB wmaker (2)
6.1 MiB + 780.0 KiB = 6.8 MiB pulseaudio
7.4 MiB + 38.0 KiB = 7.4 MiB dhclient
6.7 MiB + 1.6 MiB = 8.4 MiB wicd-monitor
4.3 MiB + 4.6 MiB = 8.8 MiB lilyterm
8.5 MiB + 1.1 MiB = 9.6 MiB wicd
17.3 MiB + 1.1 MiB = 18.4 MiB Xorg
18.4 MiB + 6.7 MiB = 25.1 MiB wicd-client
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138.7 MiB
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Linux mx1 4.17.6-gnu #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 18:57:38 UTC 2018 x86_64 GNU/Linux
No non-free or contrib packages installed on mx1! rms would be proud.