FydeOS might be a good alternative. I tried this on bare metal recently and it was pretty close to a chromeOS like desktop experience. You can get android apps to work on it as well, bit of trial and error though. Not a fan of anything google so this fydeOS is a good alternative, you can still use google stuff on it and sign in to google, but it has a local account setup i thought was worth a look. Still a no go for me, you get trapped in that ecosystem, whether it be google or fydeOS.
https://fydeos.io/

PS: fdroid works flawlessly on fydeOS without having to set android rom stuff up.
https://f-droid.org/

This is good news!

In similar news the creator of clearlooks-phenix seems to be back with an update.

https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix

without lightdm i think you would startxfce4 like so inside the .xinitrc file in the home directory.

exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session startxfce4

You would need to make sure you have xinit and dbus-x11 installed also.

with lightdm you would need the lightdm greeter.

apt install lightdm-gtk-greeter

then reboot

Are you using bluetooth audio?

I had to change line 66 from true to false in /usr/share/wireplumber/bluetooth.lua.d/50-bluez-config.lua

  -- Enable the logind module, which arbitrates which user will be allowed
  -- to have bluetooth audio enabled at any given time (particularly useful
  -- if you are using GDM as a display manager, as the gdm user also launches
  -- pipewire and wireplumber).
  -- This requires access to the D-Bus user session; disable if you are running
  -- a system-wide instance of wireplumber.
  ["with-logind"] = false,