Rpi uses 25watts? My old acer 6th gen laptop has a 15watt TDP and remains around 8watts 24/7 even with my services and without disconnecting the internals. My 8th gen laptop pulls 6watts with the screen on. People here saying older laptops arent a good choice are insane considering the ~$100-300 diffrence between an ewaste laptop and dedicated minipc + backup power bank (laptops have internal batterys you can easily replace when they go bad)
Currently switching my desktops from alpine to void just for the fun of it. Servers will always be alpine but void just feels right on the desktop!
If your looking for a diffrent desktop experiance the OS doesnt matter outside of if it has packages or not. You might want to try KDE plasma with custom themes if your not a fan of the way xfce works. Although xfce is also extreamly customizable in the way it works too if you take some time to read the docs
Sounds like you (or your distro) setup a portal wrong, they should read your theme configs and settings the same as any native application
“Home Edition: Designed for daily use” - from their website
Something tells me it might be practial for daily use