When KDE 4 came out, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 came out in (checks notes) 2011, I switched to XFCE. And that was that. I have a minimal taskbar at the bottom of my screen, with a little tray and a little button for the whisker menu. But I usually launch that using hyper + space. It gets out of my way, it gets shit done, I love it. Let's hope that it will survive the Wayland transition.
I don't have as much hatred towards Gnome 3 like everyone else does.
Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not defending it. I was a little heart broken as I really liked Gnome 2. However, I tried to be optimistic with their plans overall.
(I think the early days on Gnome 3 featured something call Gnome Legacy to keep that Gnome 2-ish feel. I likely stayed on that for a while)
I still use Gnome 3 today... but Xfce would certainly be my second choice.
I don't have "hatred" towards Gnome3. I use it for friends and families desktops, they seem to like it. I have also rolled out about ~20 Gnome3-based desktops for my employer.
That said, there are definitely areas were Gnome could be improved. Some of them are understandable and probably stem from a lack funding / devs. Others less so, like removing the options to scale / stretch / center the wallpaper w/o installing "Gnome tweaks".
It's not even the chore of installing it, Ansible will mostly do that for me. It's that I can't comprehend why something as basic as fundamental wallpaper config is not part of the normal GUI. The reasoning for that one is beyond me.
