[jimnotgym]

When Ubuntu moved to Gnome I remember getting so frustrated at how much screen space Gnome wasted that my old laptop became difficult to use. I gave up on the Linux desktop after that

[washadjeffmad]

I remember a lot of the same sentiment about GNOME 3, but if you recall, were you aware of WMs or other DEs at the time?

There was a short lag between when 2.32 was deprecated and when Maté and Cinnamon were released, and I remember XFCE and KDE still being pretty excellent. I used tiling WMs on my other TTYs so changing the defaults didn't affect me.

[ehnto]

This is very unlikely to get you back on board, but a tiling window manager like i3 gives you all the freedom and space you could possibly want.