Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive.

You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.

I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

> it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

absolutely :)

What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.

I'm going to have to give it another go then, though I do love my MATE desktop.

The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.