Android 12 Now Available From The Android Open-Source Project
The Android 12 sources have been pushed out to AOSP in officially releasing this newest version of Android. Android 12 features a new user-interface with redesigned widgets and other graphical enhancements, more efficient system performance, more responsive notifications, faster machine learning performance, various privacy enhancements, AVIF image support, a variety of new developer APIs, and many other enhancements throughout the mobile stack.
Android Developers Blog and Ars Technica.
Also at Wccftech.
See also: Android 12 review: it's mostly about the looks
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday October 06 2021, @03:08AM
You can do exactly that. On Android it's not called a "desktop manager" but a "launcher" that you can use to give Android a new UI. Some of them are very minimal, which sounds like what you are interested in.
Granted, there may not be a lot of them updated for Android 12 yet, just because it's so new.