It really depends what other init system you mean, but openrc checks all the boxes. It uses shell scripts, but I’ve never seen any that would be 500 lines long (at least in Alpine). Services can have defined dependencies as well can be classified into groups so you don’t need to configure for any specific service, you can just say ‘depend on dns’ and any available will be run. And openrc also supports running services in parallel.

In my setup I still use reverse proxy even though all of my services are inside a VPN. IMO it is just more convenient to have services accesible as subdomains or subdirectory than as different ports.

I have similar laptop currently and I have it set up exactly as you want. I’m on Void Linux with KDE Wayland, but I was using Fedora few months ago and I remember it working correctly too. Wayland uses integrated GPU by default, so in case I want some program to use dedicated GPU, there’s handy script to do that (it just sets few env variables).

I think it should be quite easy to set X with i3 to use integrated GPU, just like Wayland does.

I think most modern laptops output to display via integrated GPU even if it’s dedicated GPU doing the work. I know there are laptops with much chips that let user select which GPU is directly connected to display, but I guess those are mostly high-end models.

I was working as a DWDM technician sometime ago and IIRC most of DWDM hardware (or at least the Infinera ones, as I had used those the most) were actually running on Gentoo, which was kinda surprising for me.

But in “regular” environments I have mainly seen Ubuntu or Debian.