[tannhaeuser]

Fully agree. I was running Ubuntu 16.10 until the weekend and am in the progress of transitioning over to 20.04 LTS when it's coming out. I could live with gnome quite well so far, but now I think gnome-shell (already in 18.04 I believe) is such a regression compared to Unity, I seriously think about using a lightweight DE instead. Gnome settings and gnome-tweak are jokes, can only tune the limited and old-school libinput trackpad settings and it's driving me mad, pompous and heavyweight animations, slow response from wakeup, no menu, search is useless, pointless display of time in the middle of the menu, etc. May I ask what you're using as lightweight "DE" (I just need a Unity-style launcher I guess) on top of gnome, and that preferably is available via apt and widely used on Ubuntu?

Edit: I want to add that the freelance gigs I'm doing are mostly using Ubuntu desktops, and it's been working great in recent years, so for me, 2018 was the year of the Linux desktop. At a FinTech I worked last year, the employer gave the staff the choice of using Mac OS or Ubuntu, and most (myself included) opted for Ubuntu; performed very well as a working horse