Have made major progress so far - could probably write an article or possibly produce a short YouTube video!
Sentio Desktop launcher is quite an interesting app in terms of movable icons on the home screen/desktop, but unfortunately the apps launch outside the "desktop" environment because it's optimized only for special devices.
It turns out that the desktop is not the main part of the desktop experience - but it's actually the taskbar and the file manager!
So the best app to get started is Taskbar 6, which will launch apps in windows (free-form windows has to be turned on in Android 10+ developer menu together with one other option above that) and can be resized and minimized by simply closing them if not moving them to one side as Android tends to save their state anyhow.
The native Android 11/Lineage 18.1 "Files" app is the only one I found that works similar to Windows Explorer with a connected mouse, ticking all 3 of these boxes:
1) Right-click context menu (only around 5 alternatives feature this)
2) Double-click to open folders (only this app!)
3) Drag mouse to highlight multiple files (only this app!)
This Files app is tied to the main Android system and can only run full screen, so it can be left open permanently in the background (hiding the distracting Home screens) with the Taskbar sitting comfortably on top, launching other windowed apps in the foreground via it's Start menu.
The fastest, cleanest, web browser as part of this desktop experience is easily Firefox Nightly - better than Brave or Chrome, which are slow to open and often crash based on tabs.
The Files app needs to be efficient at quickly launching/previewing photos, music and video files by right-clicking > Open with. The best photo viewer I found is the one that comes built into Solid Explorer (the 2nd best file manager for mouse support), so that also needs to be installed. The best music player is also part of Solid Explorer, which launches in a small window and can be closed by simply tapping outside of it - usually at a different file/folder in the background Files app if not another MP3. The best video player is MX Player because it features something called Picture in Picture (PIP) mode that allows it to launch in a window and therefore be closed down easily without messing up all the apps layered in this single screen desktop mock up. VLC also features PIP, but always starts out fullscreen, so it's not good enough in this scenario.
The biggest limitation I found so far is the lack of a MS Paint type app, so this is where I use Linux Deploy as a compromise in terms of sourcing additional desktop/productivity apps, such as GIMP and Handbrake. There are also limited options at getting Linux to work on Android as a desktop experience - I hope to cover that at some point, if there's any interest.
One of the biggest challenges was managing external USB devices (must be formatted as exFAT to be shared with Windows) and providing access to Linux Deploy. Incidentally, I was able to write Windows ISOs to USBs using Android - but couldn't rip a Blu Ray disk!
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