Having recently updated to Gnome 42 (Debian 12), I was happy to see lots of improvements, but some changes around virtual workspaces rattled me. Fortunately some people have written extensions to work around the issues:

  • Vertical Overview - because I didn’t feel like changing my keyboard shortcuts, now that Gnome defaults to horizontal workspaces.
  • Disable Workspace Switch Animation for Gnome 40+ - I did not need this in the end, because of the above, but if I were to use horizontal workspaces, it would have been a must to avoid being sea-sick when using multiple monitors.

Most of the old tricks still work:

  • In gnome-tweaks we can set the Window Focus to “Focus on Hover” (because I like being able to focus a background window, while having something else on top, but not having to set it as “always on top”).
  • Alt-tab between all windows of all applications (ex: when having multiple LibreOffice or Firefox windows in the same desktop) can be changed in the Keyboard Shortcuts to use Super-Tab (although oddly my current preferences are showing it just as plain Alt-Tab - has something changed?)
  • Hide Top Bar extension - to hide the .. top bar, because it wastes space on smaller monitors.
  • Flameshot is the best tool ever to take screenshots (and to do simple edits, such as adding arrows, texts, for tutorials). I set it as a keyboard shortcut for Super+PrintScreen (or something equivalent because I have a Moolander keyboard and most of the time I have no idea what keys I’m really typing).

Oh, and about upgrading to Debian 12: I had previously installed pipewire and sound was broken after the upgrade. I had to:

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# apt install wireplumber pipewire-media-session-

and as a user:

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$ systemctl --user --now enable wireplumber.service

as documented on the Debian Wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire