I really floundered when Ubuntu 10.04 got to end of life. My personal issue with Gnome 3 was that the way I worked involved one workspace with lots of open PDF

I really floundered when Ubuntu 10.04 got to end of life. My personal issue with Gnome 3 was that the way I worked involved one workspace with lots of open PDFs. Because they all looked similar on a thumbnail, I tended to use their filenames to identify them. The 2D workspace unfortunately shuffled them around as they moved between rows, and it preferred thumbnail over filename. Basically I needed the 1D taskbar with filenames and that's what worked for me. I floundered via Unity, Fedora, eventually settling on crunchbang for a while. I tried gnome fallback and flashback but they were deficient. One day MATE appeared, and I have never appreciated a well-honed DE so much.