I'm with you. Maybe it's just that I'm familiar with Unity but GNOME feels like a step back in almost every aspect.

On the other hand you can just install KDE Plasma that went a long way and works fine if you just stick to the UI - all your pain points should work out of the box or can be configured using systemsettings. KDE applications are a mixed bag - I love dolphin but kmail and other stuff feels strange. Also printing is way better in GNOME apps, not sure why exactly.

Yes, I was shocked how good Kubuntu is. Gnome looks nice but the lack of configurability is a show stopper for many power users.

Another serious issue with Gnome IMHO, also shared with Unity, is way too small window edges so that attempting to drag-to-resize a window becomes an exercise in patience.

I'm on a laptop most of the time and, like you, have absolutely no desire to go back to wasteful non-global menus. Have you eyed a replacement DE for Unity/Ubuntu going forward?

Edit: OTOH, Ubuntu have clearly spent a good amount of effort to customize Gnome so here's hoping they can morph it to work like Unity even more (OHD, global menu)

I've tried KDE Plasma too but didn't like it either. To me it looked like 15 years behind Unity in terms of polishing, aesthetics and design/look consistency of base applications such as file and task managers. Unfortunately Unity was just right for me and everything else feels like a massive step down without tweaking the shit out of it and still not quite getting wanted result.

I believe the resize issue is fixed on Gnome3 for awhile now, or maybe it was some issue with Ubuntu's default theme?

Global Menus is unfortunately something that I still miss, although I was able to recover some screen space with an Extension called Pixel Saver, which merges the window control bar with the panel by removing the window decorations and adding the buttons to the panel. Not ideal, but useful.

Are you aware that you can hold down Alt and right-click-drag on a window to resize it? Alt+left-click-drag moves the window. (I believe it's Alt on GNOME, might be the Windows/Super/Meta/Logo-key instead.)

So, when you have your hand on the keyboard, this can be much more convenient.

This. Lack of fractional scaling is a big deal. I have 15" Full HD screen on my laptop, and everything is too small without fractional scaling (I prefer to have it set at 1.125/1.25).

GNOME 3.28 on Wayland has this as an experimental feature.

If you enable it you will find that the results are very blurry. It's unusable, to me.

I tried that as well with the same results (blurry text). The best approach I found was to install gnome-tweak-tool, and set the font scaling factor to 1.5. Chrome and a lot of other apps scale everything including ui elements by 1.5. The window manager and some other apps don't seem to support this though.

Ubuntu on my new ThinkPad X1 Carbn with 1440p 14" screen is awful due to no fractional scaling. At 150% it is perfect but with the only options being 100% or 200% it is close to useless for me. Such a shame. Guess I will need to look at how to get Wayland working to see if I can get fractional scaling back. Seems those who have got it working still have a load of issues with jaggy fonts though. I had hoped that in 2018 these things would have been solved. Even Microsoft has managed to implement a high quality solution.

The experimental fractional scaling that GNOME provides is nice but only works w/ apps that have been ported to Wayland. Everything that runs in XWayland (Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs) shows up as extremely blurry.

I've got the exact same 1440p screen as you on my Thinkpad (which wants to be run at 1.5x or 1.75x) and the best solution I've found is provided by KDE. Try installing Plasma (either by installing Kubuntu or just installing the desktop w/ apt) and setting Display->Scaling to 2X and then go into fonts separately and set "force font DPI" to 168. That's working remarkably well for both GTK and QT apps for me. 2X scaling for windows/icons keeps them from being tiny/blurry and setting the font size to 168 (aka 175%) prevents the fonts from being huge.

tbh I think I might just switch to i3wm or some other twm. Seems to be my best option from what I have read.

Yes, they dropped the nicest bits of Unity.

The Mutiny layout in UbuntuMATE 18.04 is really nice, and they've implemented the HUD, global menu, titlebar integration, and it's got HiDPI support now.

I think multimonitors is still an issue though - you can only have one dock, and it's best left on the screen on the left by the looks of it.

have the unity devs been laid off or are they working on improving gnome now do you know?

There was a global-menu extension for GNOME, but it's no longer supported. The reason for this apparently was the fact that the extension was not compatible with Wayland, so the developers moved on.

Gnome Shell is about extensions, you want something to work differently - find a suitable plugin or write it.

Except when they break horribly. Some of them modifies gsettings directly, so even if you remove it, you still have to clean them up manually.

Exactly. I had setup some dock extensions before Ubuntu went back to gnome and I'm stuck with it now, can't seem to be able to switch back. Deactivating / uninstalling said extension didn't work. I uninstalled it years after installing so probably the settings changed name or something.

It's up to developer/maintainer to provide rollback. My experience with Gnome 3 isn't deep because I've switched to KDE after 2 months of tinkering and feel happy ever since.

Funny, i thought that extensions where "here be dragons" territory where the APIs may break at any moment etc.

Meaning that it is a fig leaf from the Gnome devs to power users.