-nolisten is an actual option passed to the X server—your distro may do so by default—to work around a known security issue in some versions. I admit I'd have to look up the details, as it's been a couple of years since that issue was reported. Recent X versions almost certainly have a patch.
Gentoo works best for me because I'm a control freak. It lets me tune my system in any way I want, and I don't mind leaving my computer on while I'm asleep so that it can compile its way through libreoffice, webkit, and a couple of browsers. Plus, based on complaints I hear from people using other distros, Portage beats other package managers in every way except speed.
This doesn't mean that it's best for everyone, mind you, just that it's best for me.
There are no open security bugs against TDE that I'm aware of—if there were, I'd expect them to be fixed in the next release. In my experience, the development team, while not huge, is active and competent.
I've been using TDE since a little while after Gentoo sunsetted KDE3, and I've had no issues. Just make sure your X server is secure—-nolisten and all that stuff—and don't try to use Konqueror as a web browser (it remains an excellent file manager), and you should be fine.
Wayland is "more secure" than X in that it makes less LAN contact by default and tries to sandbox programs from one another to an extent, just in case some future browser exploit that can copy random swathes of your screen tries to screenshot your password manager or something. There are no active exploits against a correctly-configured X server at this time that will magically vanish if you switch to Wayland, as far as I'm aware—it's more future-proofing stuff.
Running a couple of Pis with Gentoo myself right now. It works as well as anything, although unless you're very patient you'll want to set up a binary package host (or distcc or something) to take the load off the Pi's somewhat anemic processor.
One thing to keep in mind about older versions of the nvidia proprietary drivers is that they will only work with specific kernel versions (and specific X versions—not sure about Wayland). Once the driver series your card needs stops being updated, you can't update your kernel without patching the driver. Assuming you have the skills to patch the driver, or someone who does makes their patches public.
I went through this song-and-dance with a very old laptop that had a card of the NV40 generation as its only GPU (no integrated graphics). Eventually I did install nouveau on it, and used it for several years without any issues.
Or ditch udisks in favour of pmount (or udevil?), which shouldn't be affected as far as I can tell. That will get you a few months' grace before a similar problem pops up there.
Based on what I've seen, for a DE to gain much traction, you need at least one well-known medium-large distro putting it as a default on some of their install media—MATE is well-represented these days because Mint backed it at a crucial stage in its development. I don't think Enlightenment ever had that.
Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?
Well, X is still out there with its thin client capabilities intact. There are Wayland-compatible VNC clients and servers, if one isn't big on X. SPICE is intended for connecting to VMs as servers. RDP if you want to use a Windows box as a server.
For a machine such as the OP describes, it would also be possible to install a tailored distro and software selection into the onboard space and place /home and such on a network drive, although that makes it impossible to take the tablet out of range of the LAN. If the touchscreen doesn't work under either the Wacom or libinput drivers, it would probably be a waste of time, though.
(Really, 16GB is plenty for the distro itself—if I remove the three kernel source trees, a couple of games, and some FreePascal stuff, my desktop system minus /home would fit in that, and it's anything but minimalistic.)
The 6.6.x kernel series is LTS and should be fine as a downgrade target (6.7.x not so much so). Unless there's something specific from the newer kernel versions that you need to drive that system, there shouldn't be any issues. I'm still on a 6.6-series kernel.
That being said, you could try troubleshooting this from the bottom up rather than the top down.
First, use lspci -v to verify that the device is being correctly identified and associated with a driver.
Next, invoke alsamixer and make sure everything is unmuted and your HD audio controller is the first sound device. The last time I had something like this happen to me, the issue turned out to be that the main soundcard slot was being hijacked by an HDMI audio output that I didn't want and wasn't using, and that was somehow muting the sound at the audio jack even when I tried to switch to it. A little mucking around in ALSA-level config files fixed everything.
Wayland's nvidia support is improving over time, but although it's becoming less popular, X11 isn't likely to be completely deprecated anytime soon—I'd expect any mainstream distro to still at least have it as an option a couple of years from now, to handle corner cases Wayland still doesn't support.
The last X11 stable version bump on my distro was about a month ago, to 21.1.16, so it isn't like it's abandonware or anything.
Wild idea: check the condition of the SDD (presumably) that you're trying to install to. After all, an installation has two endpoints, and if the target disc is on its last legs and throwing SMART errors, it ain't gonna be too happy getting written to.
Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it's been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)
Automated command-line jobs, in my case, which are technically not random but still annoying, because they don't need to show a window at all. Interestingly, the one thing I can get to absolutely not pop up any window ever are Perl scripts using Win32::Detached . . . which means that it is possible, but Microsoft doesn't bother to expose such a facility.
Eh, Gentoo is pretty quiet most of the time once you've got it installed. After that, you just have to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't go off its meds (although once every few years, it will come up with a weird and wonderful way of doing so that you can't block.)
I wouldn't say the proprietary nvidia drivers are any worse than the open-source AMD drivers in terms of stability and performance (nouveau is far inferior to either). Their main issue is that they tend to be desupported long before the hardware breaks, leaving you with the choice of either nouveau or keeping an old kernel (and X version if using X—not sure how things work with Wayland) for compatibility with the old proprietary drivers.
If those are your criteria, I would go with AMD right now, because only the proprietary driver will get decent performance out of most nVidia cards. Nouveau is reverse-engineered and can't tap into a lot of features of newer cards especially, and while I seem to recall there is a new open-source driver in the works, there's no way it's mature enough to be an option for anyone but testers.
-nolistenis an actual option passed to the X server—your distro may do so by default—to work around a known security issue in some versions. I admit I'd have to look up the details, as it's been a couple of years since that issue was reported. Recent X versions almost certainly have a patch.