[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.