I'm honestly curious, what is it that you find infuriating with Unity? I hear this often, but never specific reasons. I'm perfectly OK with Unity, and I'm a tiling WM kinda guy (so it's far from ideal, but still perfectly usable). The few times I've tried to use Gnome 3, on the other hand, I just couldn't figure it out.
I'm not the one you asked the question to but in my case it's the top bar. I can make global menus go away but not move the top bar to the bottom. The sum of those issues are the reason I never considered buying a Mac since the very first one.
I also don't like the dock but at least that can be made to auto hide. I do like lenses and I wish I could have them in the Gnome 2 look alike DE I'm using on Gnome 3 right now (Ubuntu 16.04 with gnome-flashback and some customizations, included merging the top bar in the bottom one.)
* The Launcher, just the MacOS Dock, is a waste of pixels. I don't need to see a 128x128px Firefox icon all day. It can be hidden and/or reduced to 32x32px, but bad defaults.
* Hidden menus. Can be changed, but bad defaults.
* Top Bar.
* Left aligned window controls. It's not an option to change anymore.
Con: All the UX I don't like about MacOS. Pro: At least Edit->Cut works in the file manager. YMMV 100%.
Gnome3: Has a "launcher", but it's default hidden. I use meta/win key and type what I want.
Agreed on Launcher somewhat. I hide it, but put most frequent applications there and launch them via shortcuts (Super+[1-9]). Instead of menus I use the HUD, and in general I try to use most Unity features via shortcuts and find the defaults in that department sensible.
