I use ArchLinux BTW, because

1. It's very minimal, no bloatware
2. AUR
   3. I feel superior
3. It just works™*

It's proprietary

I don't think that's normal. I run Synapse and Postgres, and they only take about 200mb of ram together. Load is less than 2% on a 2-core vm.

Not sure which distro you were using, but most have an autostart gui option and you would have to make some serious spelling mistakes to brick your system.