Ken Heard composed on 2016-07-17 11:49 (UTC-0400):
...Most of the bloat however comes from installation of a DE; I deliberately did not install any of the DEs favoured by Debian. Consequently I had to install the x-window-system before installing the DE of my choice....
As every DE depends on X, required X packages will automatically be installed simply by installing even a minimal TDE. There's been no need for me to take the extra step in Debian, *buntu, Mageia, Fedora or openSUSE.