Gnome constantly seems to tell me that the way I want the DE to work is "wrong" and eventually renegs on my complaints (e.g. vertical workspaces, forcing a user to slide up the lock screen, etc.). So I was pretty happy to see the change for workspaces to be horizontal instead of vertical.
That said - why couldn't they just go the full way and support a grid? Ironically it's the one way in which Mac offers a better option for desktop management.
@funnylookinhat the beauty of Gnome is in its extensions. The vanilla UX is often questionable. My desktop UX is almost unchanged since 1998 or something around it:) And I can have it in the way I like in Gnome 3 as well.
For your case, there is this one https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1485/workspace-matrix/
@lig Oh yeah I think you are right in that Gnome is a good clean slate - and ironically I use that same extension! But why can't the Gnome devs take some of these more popular ideas and own the extensions themselves so that they would have first-class support and not be at risk of breaking every release?
I think we're about 3 or 4 extensions away from covering 90 percent of the changes most users want or need.