Sway and hyprland are going to be the main recommendations, especially hyprland because it is pretty feature-rich. I personally have been using River for the last few months, which I’ve been able to completely replicate my five year old bspwm set up with using the rivercarro layout. It’s not as popular, but I’ve really liked it so far.
I’ve used it on my pi before I disabled the display manager because I barely used it, but performance was fine. I could log in from my desktop, phone, laptop, another pi, anything really, which was nice to have.
I was the same but in 2017. Six years later and I’m still using the same Void install. There’s simply no reason for me to switch, it’s perfect and I have my system tailored exactly to my liking at this point.
To your first point, a huge portion of the use library computers get is from people who don’t own or can’t afford their own computer but just need to print government/work/school docs with some minimal document editor. Sure you could run with LibreOffice or something and hope no one cares, but you’re right that most people would freak out if they can’t open something in Word or have to learn how to print something in Gnome/KDE/whatever.
I run Calibre-web tied into my Calibre server so I can read on every device I own.
I played around with it in a VM earlier today. I liked the overall feel of it quite a bit, even as someone who prefers not to use gnome. But there are quite a few inconsistencies in using the alpha compared to what’s in the handbook, particularly for installing new packages. I wonder if that’s something that’s still being implemented in Orchid.
I liked it though, I’ll definitely keep following it.
I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.