Suggestions for distributions with novel ideas

I have an older laptop (more than 8 years) that I don't need for work anymore so I'm planning on turning it a machine to play around with OSs. Because of that I wanted some suggestions on distributions that have interesting novel ideas, but that are suitable for installing on a laptop and not just in a virtual machine.

I'm experienced with Linux and alternatives (I even used FreeBSD as my main system for a while), so I'm not afraid to read documentation and code a little were needed. Mainly, I just want to learn what is new and interesting because it has been a while since I've been distrohopping and I don't know what else is out there.

Currently I'm considering Guix because I fancied the idea of using Lisp and the main glue of the system, but I'm also thinking about playing around with non-Linux OSs such as Haiku or Plan9 if they work with the laptop, so I can see how far they have come since the last time I checked on them.

Laptop information: Acer Aspire V 15, Intel i5 processor, Geforce 840M, 8GB RAM.

Distributions that I'm already familiar with and I don't plan on testing right now: Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Arch Linux, Fedora, Puppylinux.

Distributions that I'm familiar with and might test to see how they've changed or because I never got deep into them: Gentoo, Slackware, Gobolinux, FreeBSD.

Distributions that I've heard about, but don't seem very interesting right now (mostly things I've seen in Distrowatch or here): Manjaro, Kali, EndeavourOS, Elementary, distributions built mainly to showcase a particular desktop environment or for very old computers.

If you have other suggestions of interesting distributions to look at, I'd be grateful for them.