There seems to be a solid community of Linux people growing here, so thought I might try asking...

I'm building a head unit for my car, using a Raspberry Pi to a 7" (and eventually 10-14") touch screen.

I'd like to have a fast-booting Linux distro with tiling windows that lets me set up a config file to launch a bunch of programs that are tiled perfectly edge to edge, with minimal border (a 1px line us OK), minimal header (just the name of the program? or none at all maybe), and have them all locked in place so I can't accidentally drag one or resize one when touching audio controls, for example.

The idea is to have a few windows, such as an audio player, a GPS map, 2 dash cam feeds, and an OBDII style sensor readouts, all on screen at the same time, each sized differently.

I've got each individual program working fine on Raspbian right now, but no idea how to go about the tiling-on-boot, locking them in place, etc.

Can I do it with Raspbian with some specific window manager? or do I need a different distro?

Thanks in advance.

So I tried to install sway on my desktop today. This required a lot of fiddling, as I had to pull in bleeding-edge dependencies for the Wayland libraries, and had to build the compositor framework wlroots. Finally however, I had everything compiled and ready to go and....

Proprietary Nvidia drivers are not supported. Use Nouveau.

I had completely forgotten that sway requires open-source Nvidia drivers. So - has anyone had experience using Nouveau? How usable is it from day-to-day? How noticeable is the performance hit when switching from proprietary drivers?

I feel that the mobile user interfaces has been developed and changed immensly compared to desktops, when it comes iOS and Android. While Windows has pushed some controversial but interesting features, macOS and Linux DEs has been kind of stagnant. Has desktop interfaces reached its peak form? Or is there more developments to come?