IDK about anyone else's experience but workspaces are not cheap on seemingly any system. Gnome on Linux, MacOS, Windows, all seem to have unacceptable performance degradation the more workspaces you open. I assume that this is because some frame buffer is being kept alive in all cases, but for the love of God, why?
I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effort and money involved, OSX is the worst at it. Somewhere greater than 5 workspaces, each managing a fairly small amount of work, it lags like crazy on a powerful machine (M2, 64GB RAM). Gnome will just hang until the workspace has "finished" switching. Windows will switch quickly but will flash every app white until it reloads whatever context it needs to show me the right pixels. I know that workspaces exist somewhere in no man's land between "normal people" (what's a workspace?) and "power users" (who have thirty context-specific keyboard shortcuts for their desktop layout) but it's insane how badly they (anecdotally) perform across platforms. Not that your experiment isn't valuable, I certainly appreciate literally any amount of effort going into this problem, but I do wonder if I'm doing something specific to trigger the problems I'm seeing.
Workspace being froze or causing issue, is just the symptom of the actual problem. It's not the workspace are the problem. So, maybe you should investigate the underlying issue.
Which version of Gnome are you using? Older version of Gnome had an issue with workspace switch, which has been fixed over a year ago.
You do realize, Surface Pro 3 is a 10 year old laptop, which only have 4GB of RAM, and iGPU, and I have opened up 14 workspace, with multiple applications. And, obviously it had some lag, but it never became unusable.
maybe you’re doing something different from everyone else or your expectations are too high, but three finger swiping to move between spaces on macOS should feel smooth and buttery. There's a 200 millisecond lag after you switch spaces and when your input gets rendered (it starts accepting input in the new space as soon as you switch) that, if you're staring at that and focusing on that, watching it like a hawk, exists, but if you can get over that, Spaces/virtual desktops is a useful feature. The whole screen needing to rerender shouldn't be happening. What apps (or more likely, your IT department) are you running?
