I wish someone would make a tiling desktop environment instead of only a window manager to make them easy to use for all without tweaking because they are the future of the DEs.
I can’t stand tiling environments, apart from Emacs lol.
I use Window Maker which is a classic WM I used back in the 90’s. I used to use XFCE, still do on a couple of laptops, and I thought I would miss the DE stuff that WM obviously didn’t have.
Nope, I just brought in stuff that WM had that made it more useful.
If you use a distro based on Ubuntu or Debian (like PopOS and others) I recommend Regolith Desktop. You can install it on an existing setup and it’s ready to go out of the box. You can choose it from the login screen like any other desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. The next version will also bring Sway/Wayland support since obviously X is on its way out in the long term.
Theres a gnome extension for tiling. You can also use i3 with xfce (I like wayland so I stopped using that)
There is an extention of Gnome called pop-shell that does exactly what you want
I personally use the tiling features recently introduced in plasma. For my needs it works just fine.