3pt14159 put it well: There are more than a dozen really useful keyboard shortcuts for UI management, and tiling your windows. I mean, it's powerful - maybe one of the most standout features of Unity. You know what is really the icing on it? Hold down the "Super" key, and you get a menu showing all the UI keyboard shortcuts. It's a quick modal - no Alt-F1 help dialogs to navigate and close; no link to a website; a handy cheatsheet instantly accessible and dismissed.
I'll give GNOME a try, but everything I hear is that it's a directionless blob that makes productivity difficult.
In 2013, when I have first chosen gnome, it was to replace the PC of my old parents. I have contributed to a gnome extension (translated in french) https://bitbucket.org/LukasKnuth/backslide to make it looks like their previous computer on windows XP.
AFAIK, ubuntu gnome is very stripped down by default, but it is easy to tailor to fit many needs. The extensions are often written in javascript.
The trouble is, that different people have different ideas what 'make OS work' means. An essential feature of yours is other's bloat. Hence extensions.
The one big one for me is Super+number to jump to a window (super+3 to switch to the third window on the toolbar). Both Windows and Unity support this, but there's no way to get it on most other linux DEs (with Cinnamon there are plugins but they are really buggy). Not sure about gnome though.
Alt-` cycles through the windows within one application, such as terminal or Chrome. Similar to what can be done on the Mac. I use it & hope Gnome can do the same.
It's exactly the same in Gnome. In fact, Gnome is better in that you can activate an extension which will change the behaviour of alt-tab so that it cycles through all windows.
I feel like I'm being asked to list all the shortcuts I use, which seems impossible and I've never used Gnome, so I don't know what it's missing. But off the top of my head the must haves are:
1. Open a new terminal and max screen it with focus in the prompt, not on the "window".
2. Move windows between workspaces.
3. Screenshot with copy to clipboard.
4. Disable "quit all" for applications on an application-by-application basis (I never want to nuke chrome, but I often want to close all finder windows).
5. When plugged into a monitor, move active application to the monitor and have it show up correctly. If it was maximized or full screen, make it maximized or full screen in the new context and make sure to handle different pixel resolutions correctly.
6. Fullscreen toggle.
7. Maxscreen toggle.
8. Paste from clipboard without formatting.
9. Make capslock an additional control.
10. Remap individual control keys and have them work in all contexts and in all ways resemble those keys (something that Unity doesn't do which drives me insane in Slack in the browser where I can't always copy and paste because Slack somehow knows capslock isn't a "real" control).
