I am trying to find a very lightweight linux distro to run on my veryy old laptop (2gb of ram , i3 4100k) I wanted to know how much ram garuda linux xfce uses on idle so I can chose a appropriate OS for the machine.
Well you cannot use Garuda
3 gb is minimum threshold
You can find other distros which are lightweight
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For me Linux Mint, uses around 900 - 1000 Mb on idle
Yeah I Just went with arch craft which uses about 300mb at idle
I don’t think that it exists. Probably you meant 4100U?
Anyway, try Arch Linux. It is really lite.
IMHO the perspective is faulty.
If you ran Firefox, 2GB is not enough, even in XFCE, or dwm DEs.
If you are willing to use the lightest applications, even with less features than prime apps, that’s what you should be looking for.
Start from the lightest DEs and apps and see if you can take it. Because if not, you’ll know you need HW upgrade. 
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In the past I had a lot of fun with Puppy Linux. I used it from a USB entirely to RAM (saving data on USB at shutdown) on a very old 2gb RAM laptop. It was so fast, and even funny for my kids.
For sure it was only an experiment for me, to show my wife how fast that piece of hw she wanted to throw away could have been with Linux, but all the basic applications for browsing, emailing, etc were working smoothly, although with lighter applications, as said...
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Yeah I might as well do that 
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Well mine was just an anecdote to support the fact that lightweight is a distribution, including and especially the choice of applications.
Perhaps Puppy is a bit of an extreme case, but you never know... 
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