Funnily, I find I am most productive in Gnome 3, despite its many flaws. The workflow that revolves around the super key to view, launch, and switch between windows and desktops works very well, and I have not been able to fully recreate the same experience in any of the other DEs (though I haven't tried Budgie).

One big change that helped reduce the performance lag is turning off animations using the Tweak Tool. It was like a breath of fresh air once I made that adjustment.

Sadly Gnome3, although sucking badly in many aspects, dumbed down and bloated, is the only viable option for tablets. Unless something has changed in the last months, having correct screen orientation and rotation consistent with correct touch management without adding/editing scripts by hand is a nightmare: imagine you finally get the screen correctly orientated but now if you drag the finger to the right the arrow goes up.

Dont forget Budgie. While not quite as polished as it can be its a newcomer so I am not surprised. It is otherwise a sweet DE for me.

I ran budgie for about a year before switching back to windows for work and its leagues better than Gnome in my experience. Though at this point I think I would go for KDE given the opportunity.

I dont mind KDE and I do like Kubuntu but at work everyones on Gnome DEs so I try to have close enough environments so they dont blame KDE for all my problems when things break.

I get it. The mac dev's like to blame windows at my place.

Windows usually has some easier to setup utilities to develop on for some projects. We have Mac, Windows and mostly Linux devs. I sometimes wish I was on Windows its more predictable to me.