Visit here for inspiration: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ (safe for work, despite the name).

Pick a window manager, learn how to use it, and go from there. Popular options are i3 (i3-gaps if you want some space between windows), sway (i3, but for Wayland), bspwm, awesome wm. Usually they're used in combination with polybar (highly customizable status bar) and rofi as an application launcher.

Then add a, say, 10Gb volume to your guest instance and party like you're on the road to mad skillz.