After Pangolin upgrade, Workspace Desktop and Alt-Tab Problems

[rpaskudniak]

Greetings.

After much procrastination, I finally allowed my 11.10 to upgrade to
12.04 (Pangolin). And as usual, it blew off my grub, making it
unbootable in either Windows or Ubuntu. Though this time around it did
display a grub menu. Thanks to the Boot-Repair disk I was able to
recover my dual boot. But that was just for starters.

I now have the the upgrade in place, but I have two major annoyances:

• Alt-Tab does not work for switching between windows.
• Workspace manager is somewhat messed up.

I'll explain the workspace problem:
In Gnome-classic (my preferred desktop env), I like to have my 4-6
desktops displayed in single row so that I might be able to see the
teensy icons on them. The default is 4 desktops represented in the
"taskbar" as 2x2 rectangles in a small space, that is 4 desktops on 2
rows. So I go to change this by right-clicking on the 2x2 toolbar at
selecting "Preferences" the only choice given.

The "Workspace Switcher Preferences" dialog box shows me that I have 1
workspace displayed in 1 row. This appears to contradict my above
description of the 4 desktops on two rows.

Am I confusing what I call a desktop with what Gnome is calling a
Workspace?

In any case, before I realized this possible confusion (which I doubt
is really confusion), I tried correcting that setup by setting 5
workspaces in 1 row. The result looks just like I wanted to see so all
is OK, right? Wellll, that is until I click on one of them.

What happens then? I see my lovely wallpaper with no icons, no toolbar
on top or bottom of the screen. In fact I seem to have no way to get
back to my original desktop #1. In desperation, I press Ctrl-Alt-Del
and voila! I get it back. For a minute, until I find myself at the
login screen. I guess the 3-finger salute got me logged out.

So my help requests are:

1. How can I get Alt-Tab to start working again?
2. How can I get the Workspace/Desktop business to behave as I am accustomed?
3. Is there a functional difference between the terms desktop and workspace?
4. Will Ubuntu EVER fix it so that the upgrade leaves me with a bootable system, without fixing the MBR and using the boot-repair? (Well, that's already off-topic for this new thread.)

Thank y'all.

[Orinoco]

I'm having a similar problem.

Before the upgrade, I kept different programs running in different workspaces, and I could use Alt-Tab to switch between programs running in two different workspaces. This was very handy for some of the work I do, in going back and forth between two programs in different workspaces.

After the upgrade, Alt-Tab will only switch to another program running in the same workspace. If I want to switch to a program in another workspace, I must mouse over to the sidebar and select the workplace switcher or the other program's icon. I can, of course, work around this by moving both programs to the same workspace, but this sort of defeats the purpose of having separate workspaces.

It is very annoying to lose functionality after upgrading. I can somewhat understand losing my Nvidia display driver, because of the whole open source purity thing, but not functions of standard hot keys.

I'd appreciate advice on how to proceed getting this resolved.