If you’re after fluid yet lightweight animations then you should definitely check out Wayfire. Yes it’s Wayland and a WM not a DE, but you can get a distro/spin with Wayfire and all the stuff you need for a DE all pre-installed and pre-configured. Wayblue (based on Fedora uBlue) is one such option you can try. And because Wayblue is immutable and has reliable atomic updates, it’d make a great option for you as a school-goer as stuff rarely breaks and you can always rollback to a previous image before the update.