One thing that I really missed, however, was being able to switch between workspaces using the Superkey + a key on the Numpad. Also, the completely new ergonomic layout of Gnome 3, which I was not really used to, was not such a big issue for me because I’ve been mainly using this laptop for conference calls and documents editing, nothing fancy. It’s Lenovo T480s, which is more than generous as far as computing power goes, I’ve had no issues with Gnome 3 whatsoever on this machine. I really only started using Gnome 3 with RHEL 8 on my business laptop. To this date, I still have this old Lenovo X201t, which is 11 years old now, but it still makes for a pretty good bed-side laptop, especially because of its convertible nature and stylus (currently, I’m using LXQT there as a good lightweight option). For that reason, I preferred the already mentioned Mate, or i3wm, which consumed very little resources even on old hardware. Partially because I was used to it, but more importantly, my home computers were never exactly the cutting edge of computer technology, quite to the contrary, resources were always somewhat scarce, and Gnome 3 was just too resource hungry for me to use it. As far as desktop environments go, I somehow got stuck in the Gnome 2 days, and when Gnome 3 became a thing, I simply carried on with its fork, Mate.

Ubuntu switching workspaces