2001herne

So, for a single purpose kiosk device, I’ve had some success with not using a DE or WM at all - essentially putting the desired application inside your xinitrc. In that case, you would need to configure the window geometry using xdotool (I think). There’s probably something similar for Wayland. Alternatively, a tiling wm like i3 or Sway could be useful if you remove all the keybinds from the config file.

ETA: for a device like that, I would say that arch is a potential starting point, but you might also consider an immutable distro. I don’t have any experience with them though.

ETA2: For the hardware, a Raspberry Pi is not a bad starting point, but Arch on Arm isn’t officially supported. Your mileage may vary

And if you need a tray icon, birdtray works well.

And even with that proviso, I’ve been using birdtray for ages, and it works well enough.

On windows 11, I believe you just can’t set it up without internet. There’s a couple of registry hacks you can do to bypass that though.