Thanks to the Gnome 3 / Unity / Ubuntu fiasco years back, I started using tiling window managers and never looked back. I might have kept on using Gnome 2 happily but the intrusive changes made me look for alternatives.

The desktop metaphor and floating windows might make sense for casual computer users (mostly because they're used to it) but for programmers and power users it's just not a very good setup.

fwiw. I have used awesome, dwm and now bspwm.