[Any keystroke] -> New Terminal. [Any window manager worth it's salt]!

I've had ALT-F2 bound to New Terminal window for the past 12 years now, through half-a-dozen window managers. ALT-F1 is new browser, and I've got some preferred CTRL-ALT-arrow keys for moving around virtual desktops. Everything has configurable keys and has for a long time, though sometimes you have to create a one-line shell script to pop up a terminal, find your local menu editor, add that script, then give that menu entry a shortcut.

With apologies to XKCD...

http://i.imgur.com/EB5K9.png

Seriously though...

Xmonad is entirely unlike Gnome, KDE, XFCE et al. And thank goodness because I don't like 'desktops', overlapping windows and what not. Xmonad and its brethren wms give me what I want out of a GUI.

Yes, tiling Window Managers are great. I do still run GNOME (2), I just swapped out the default window manager to something more to my liking.

You can set keyboard shortcuts on Gnome 3. Though I prefer super-enter for launching gnome terminal (from my earlier ventures with awesome).

alt-enter = new teminal. http://i3wm.org/

I recently switched to Xmonad and I must say that I really enjoy it.