what you are asking for doesn't really make sense.
a display manager is for running when no user is logged in. its purpose is to log in and start your session. thats why they can't show a desktop as a background because ot isn't running yet. once you log in the display manager quits because its job is done.
In the days of old people would cover both sides of a letter with writing and then tri-fold it before putting it in an envelope. this makes it much harder to read it through the envelope (by holding it up to a light).
Wow all that bezel and the wrong screen ratio makes this thing look nothing like a Vectrex.
ETA: For me one of the key features of mini consoles and mini retrocomputers is that they look like a smaller version of the original. This one misses that mark by a lot.
I haven't experienced any connection drops on wifi and I haven't noticed any slowdowns. To be fair, I haven't done any load testing. I'm traveling now but I can do some testing when I'm back next week.
They are based on different kernels and what I can tell you is that I tried a few distros and either or both the trackpad and wifi were not working.
LMDE was the first distro I tried that just worked. I didn't try the mainline Mint first because I like debian. I'm running enlightenment as my desktop and terminology as my terminal.
lspci says I have a BCM4360 (rev 03). I can tell its loading a 3rd party driver because I see a warning about it tainting the kernel in my dmesg output.
Note that I'm not running regular Linux Mint, but LMDE which is Linux Mint based on plain Debian instead of Ubuntu. Both are available on the Linux Mint site.
I have a 2013 i7 Macbook Air and everything "just works" with the latest Linux Mint Debian Edition, including wifi and both usb ethernet and thunderbolt ethernet.
the choice is yours, ring doorbell or privacy