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Almost everything that's not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.
Could try openbox, its old but works. Highly customisable but still lightweight.
i3wm is pretty light on resources
Probably LXQt or MATE
Maybe dwm or dwl. I'm a hyprland user but this would be the minimum you should go for
Arch user here. Never had any problems with Sway and Hyprland, but still... ratpoison is what you are looking for.
Just a window manager? Not a DE?
Under X11 there is Openbox, bspwm, herbstluftwm, dwm, i3, Awesome, Ratpoison, spectrwm, Qtile, ...
Under Wayland: Weston, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, River, Cagebreak, dwl, ...
I keep things pretty dull and use Openbox + LXQt. It is a stacking WM that is stable, and LXQt is snappy.
If you are looking for a light DE LXQt is very light, Plasma is lighter than it used to be, but it also has loads of features. Xfce has more options for configuration than LXQt and I think it isn't quite ready for Wayland.
Maybe Sway would be up your alley?
(Note to self: check https://arewewaylandyet.com)
Used to have an Eee PC running CrunchBang (Debian + Openbox). Really lightweight and simple (some potential for customization), and it was enough to carry me all the way through university.
Icewm, antix linux uses it and whole system on startup uses ~200mb ram
On my old asus eeepc I used to have arch with i3 as a tilling window manager for a while. It was taking a bit to get used to but once I worked it out and configured it how I liked it, it was fantastic. Used it for several years until I had to write my thesis and needed something stable for my operating system.
for lightweight, i would recommend LXQt (qt) or LXDE (gtk). XFCE also seems pretty nice.
also, you could check out i3 and bspwm if you a tiling window manager.
i would've recommended sway, but it sounds like you didn't have a very nice experience with hyprland, and that could be because it uses wayland.
Lxqt
I am old school and still use Fluxbox for that kind of work load. Wish they had Wayland support!
I have the exact same netbook and specs and I installed fedora lxde a couple months ago just to see how it would go and..it's pretty decent performance if you use it just to browse the web or text editing.. Installed vscodium and it got laggy as hell though ... Had to use geany instead
Is you specifically want a wayland compositor like hyprland, you can try sway or qtile. I've also heard good things about river but never used it myself.
why not Dwm ?
dwm (or dwm-flexipatch if you dislike patching manually)
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