> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.
Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/.
Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).
I use MATE, personally, because it gives me the configurability that I want without the resource hungriness of KDE or cinnamon.
Cinnamon, while more resource hungry than MATE, actually isn't bad except that Nemo (its file manager) seems to have this bug where if you're doing a lot of batch file operations it just gets slower and slower to the point of becoming unusable... and it seems like its gone unfixed for ages. That's a deal breaker for me since I do photo and video editing and have to work with a lot of files. Caja (MATE's file manager) never seems to have a problem no matter how much I throw at it.
I find that MATE looks pleasing enough to me and is fast enough that it never reminds me that I'm slowing down my machine with a full-featured DE. That said, I tend to run modern hardware even though its by no means a powerful gaming rig.
For those who need something similar on older hardware, or who want a bare minimal but "nice" DE that will consume minimal resources, xfce is likely it.
Indeed, I believe MATE is still quite close to GNOME 2 which has launched in 2002 according to wikipedia. You can still probably run it in the low 100MBs of RAM comfortably :)
Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/.
Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).