I get the feeling you’re not happy with Gnome, but not unhappy enough to ditch it.
Open Source window managers and desktop environments enough to choose from, preferred ones here are ctwm for low resources environments (RPi) and xfce4 for intel based laptops. There are loads of other options, I’m sure, but no experience with those. (KDE and Gnome are the reason my wife and I use xfce4)