Disclaimer: I’ve used tiling window managers for all of 30 minutes in my life.

If you just want a faster cinnamon, you might consider merely switching to XFCE. Just change the menu to the whisker menu and you’ll be right at home.

WMs don’t typically come with “sane defaults” in the DE sense of the word; you have to make your own sanity. In order to find sane defaults, you’ll probably have to switch to a distro that has its own custom configs. (That being said, you can always copy the configs back to your original distro when you know what you want.) Maybe check out Mabox for some inspiration. I can’t speak to any other beginner WM distros.

You want a quick how-to?

1.) Ordinarily I’d say the first step is to make a list of every app you regularly use and make sure it works in Linux (or that there’s a viable alternative for Linux), but outside of CAD, Photoshop, and a few holdout games, this isn’t really an issue anymore.

2.) Backup everything that matters to you.

3.) Pick a desktop environment before you pick a distro. The distro almost doesn’t even matter. The most popular options are GNOME and KDE. I assume XFCE (my favorite) and Cinnamon are a distant third and fourth.

4.) Pick a beginner distro (like Mint, PopOS, Garuda, Fedora, or whatever else gets recommended in the comments) that has an edition for your preferred DE. (Just check the download section of their websites.)

5.) Grab an old thumb drive. 4GB is plenty, last I checked.

6.) Go to the website of your preferred distro. Download an ISO file.

7.) Download a program to flash the ISO onto your thumb drive. Balena Etcher is one. Run it, and flash the ISO.

8.) Shutdown your computer. On restart, spam the escape key, or maybe some of the F keys, depending on your computer. Instead of booting normally, you should get a menu.

9.) Navigate through the menus and disable secure boot and TPM. Then under boot order, move the USB to the top of the list.

10.) Restart, hopefully loading the USB’s live environment.

11.) Play around in the live environment before installing. Test something with sound. Maybe load a youtube video or something. Make sure everything works.

12.) Run through the installer. Reboot. Spam esc/F10/whatever and get back into the BIOS menu. Reset boot priority to boot from hard drive. Reboot.

13.) Run through the steps on whatever welcome screen you see. If not prompted, update your system first thing. You can figure out the rest from there.

I strongly recommend XFCE if you can’t upgrade. It’s the snappiest of the easy DEs, and on a 10yo laptop, I suspect you’ll notice. LXQT is half a tier more difficult, depending on how much you want to tweak the work flow.

If for some reason XFCE is still too heavy and slow, you can go lighter than LXQT without giving yourself a headache, but the only true beginner openbox distro I know of is Mabox, and you seem to prefer point release distros.

Edit: You know what though? Try KDE first; if it’s fast enough for you, great!

Distro doesn’t really matter. Just pick any popular beginner-friendly distro that supports your preferred desktop environment. Use a gaming distro like Garuda or Nobara if you really want to, but I doubt it makes a huge difference.

Manjaro was my first distro, and I still have a soft spot for it despite its flaws, but I tend to think Garuda now does a better job filling the Manjaro niche in just about every way.

Teddit and Libreddit are still working. I guess you don’t need an API key to lurk.