If we are doing a survey I use spectrwm and it has empty/dedicated workspaces. It also has a concept of shared workspaces, windows there are present in all workspaces, used for fleshing out common desktop ui docks and the like. I have to admit that while I spent a couple of hours figuring it out one day, It turns out I prefer a really thin/bare desktop so don't use it.
Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this sweet spot between super simple with few moving parts yet still configurable enough to work the way I want to. far simpler than xmonad or even I3 but with better defaults and more easily configurable than dwm.
does it integrate well with any desktop environment? that was the other killer feature of xmonad for me, it worked well with MATE and kde until the wayland switch. I ultimately switched to cosmic because of issues with the (wayland + DE + xmonad) stack, but I do miss the better tiling features of xmonad.
Unfortunately I don't really know, I mean as far as I can tell gnome or kde programs run fine, but I am not running any of background tooling that normally goes with a full desktop environment.
Spectrwm is not well known, but it fits this sweet spot between super simple with few moving parts yet still configurable enough to work the way I want to. far simpler than xmonad or even I3 but with better defaults and more easily configurable than dwm.