The Jupyter Notebook interface/server just opens singular notebooks (i.e. one notebook per browser tab).
Jupyter Lab is an IDE where you can open notebooks, files, terminals, etc all in one interface. Additionally, you can easily adjust the layout of open files (want notebooks side by side? Click one notebook's tab and drag it to one side of the screen. Want a terminal on the bottom of the screen? Open a terminal and drag its tab to the bottom of the screen. Want 3+ notebooks side by side? Click and drag. Etc).
I basically only use the Jupyter Lab interface when I'm working with notebooks (sorry about using the term notebooks so much, it's a synonym for a .ipynb file as well as the name of a server mode Jupyter offers).
Lab is essentially for power users who need tabs of notebooks and multiple .py files open at a time in a single window. If you ever only work on a _single_ notebook at a time then it is overkill.
Please stop doing this. If you have personal experience to share that is valuable. If you are just cutting and pasting from an AI, anyone on HN can do that. It is no more helpful than copying a list of results from a search engine. Your HN contributions should be written by you, not a computer.
