main thing to keep in mind is that a window manager is normally just one component of a desktop environment – full desktop environments like Gnome go to great lengths to assemble a whole fleet of apps to work together to make a cohesive experience
if you’re going to forego the full desktop environment, then expect to have to fill in on the various missing pieces to suit your needs (file manager, terminal, text editor, clipboard manager, bar/panel/dock)
if you just want lighter weight but maintain a cohesive experience, then Xfce or LXQt
otherwise, there are a LOT of choices (both for X11 and for Wayland)
tiling window managers
i3 on X or Sway on Wayland are probably the most popular
special mention: Regolith – pairs Sway on the front end with Gnome components underneath
dwm for the full do-it-yourself experience
awesome if you like Lua, xmonad if you like Haskell, exwm if you live in Emacs, Qtile if you like Python
stacking window managers
Openbox for the old school feel, LabWC as the Wayland successor
IceWM and JWM for a minimal experience (both show up regularly on Raspberry Pi)
examples from professional recipes – measurements are given as weights (in grams) – no worrying about how much brown sugar in a “packed cup” or if your cup of flour has been sifted enough or what exactly is meant by a “cup of spinach”
examples from baking recipes – measurements are given as percentages – allows easy scaling up and down
along those same lines, used Chromebooks – Google ends support after only a couple years so school districts all over the place are generally stuck with palettes of e-waste
“I had not realized … that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
an extreme option could be something like the Varvara / Uxn virtual machine by the Hundred Rabbits collective (created after having to deal with Adobe updates and Xcode updates over a barely functioning cell connection) – emulators are available for all sorts of hardware
