[pmontra]

The menus should be in the hamburger menu on the top right of each window. A time waster and a recent fad coming from small screen devices.

I can't answer your other questions. Not only I don't have GNOME 40 but I greatly tweaked Ubuntu 20' GNOME to disable all animations, remove the launcher, move the top bar to the bottom, use those very same horizontal virtual desktops they introduced in 40 (hurrah) and add an old Windows like taskbar. It feels much more productive than the default settings.

[beowulfey]

Any reason why you did all that vs. trying something like KDE?

I like Gnome default, but KDE does most of what you described by default too.

[pmontra]

I gave a try to KDE for a couple of months in 2014 and didn't like it. I felt I was clicking twice as much as in GNOME to accomplish the same thing. Furthermore I liked the look of GNOME more than KDE's.

I kept using GNOME fallback (or flashback?) until 2018 because it worked as I like. I knew there were GNOME shell extensions to suit my needs by then so I switched to GNOME shell with Ubuntu 18.04.

I never researched KDE so I don't know what became of it. A total change of DE is a big thing and could take a lot of time.