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> 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).
> Is there a reason the latest chrome can't run on 7 if it didn't check for it?
The reason is precisely because it doesn't check for it.
That is: instead of checking for older Windows releases, and using fallback code paths for them, it simply assumes the presence of newer APIs (or that older buggy APIs now work properly). As time goes by, the cost of maintaining these fallback code paths only increases (and in some cases, having to stay compatible with them prevents important enhancements and cleanups), and since they're less tested (because they're only used when running on older operating system releases), they tend to break. As an example from an unrelated project, before they dropped Windows XP support, the fallback code for panic!() in Rust was broken when running on Windows XP (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34538).
Budgie might be worth checking out (I've used it on Manjaro): https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop It was extremely responsive on a 2009 laptop.
Otherwise whatever AntiX and Puppy use, which are mouse-driven UIs, are probably lower-resource than Budgie.
The same decision has been made in Python, to use the newer APIs blindly, but fortunately there's a fork: https://github.com/adang1345/PythonWin7 Hope Chromium will get one soon.
My favourite WM is awesomewm[1]
It's mainly tiling but it has a floating mode. Also it's very customizable using Lua scripts.
I love it because it's the closest thing to a modern back ion3/notionwm[2]
But now I think that getting away from X11 is one of my main concerns so I'm not using any of these things.
_1: https://awesomewm.org/
_2: https://notionwm.net/
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs?
I think FVWM is what you are looking for. Last commit on May 10. https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/