I’m going to be doing a clean install of Arch Linux on an old ThinkPad tomorrow morning, and I’d like some suggestions for a window manager, desktop environment, or Wayland compositor.

It can have a learning curve, but I would like it to not have too steep a learning curve (I have been using i3 for a while, and I have just come from LeftWM which I configured to have i3 keybinds). Also, in order to make it fairly obvious to my peers that I’m using Linux, I’d like it to look nothing like Windows or macOS.

Preferably something light (at least out of the box). When I was using LeftWM, my RAM usage was often around 200MB. I recently did a system analysis and I have 8GB of RAM, but my CPU will hold me back. It’s an Intel Core 2 Duo of the Penryn microarchitecture (x86_64-v1).

Any suggestions?