Window maker is indeed amazing and would be a shame to loose. It was my go-to back in the day.

By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren’t as full-featured as DE’s but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job’s NextStep’s UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/

Probably lxqt. https://lxqt-project.org/ Very lightweight yet a full-on DE (minus bells and whistles). Found on most Linux distros repositories.

The pain is 2 real…

Yeah, what happened to those? (Honest question)

Don’t you mean Sid (unstable) ? :)

Subbed.