Jiří Král

On Linux there’s also the Waydroid project which might be a more safe option and actually runs pretty well on my budget machine considering it runs on top of another OS.

BlissOS might do?

They state x86_64 on their downloads page, so it is probably for 64 bit systems only, but OP’s tablet being from 2021 should be 64 bit.

I don’t recommend Fedora as a distro for this as they do not have the Maliit keyboard in the repos and you will have to build it yourself.

Last time I tryed Fedora KDE few months back it had a Maliit keyboard, but I was using the desktop version of the shell.

MacOS is open-source in its core?

You could use dash to panel extension, in the settings move the bar to the top, reorganize it as you wish (you should be able to make it look practically indentical to the original panel), make it thinner and turn on autohide. Even though I have some bad experience with the dash to panel authide feature and know this is a half baked solution. See if it works for you.

I had about 16 extensions before the last update. After I updated 2 of them became unsupported which 1 of them is already supported again if I am not mistaken. It depends on what extensions you use of course.

You can customize Gnome quite a lot if you want it just requires a bit of knowledge.