An update on my situation for anyone interested:
So GNOME Shell doesn’t have the fullscreen issue that Unity had, but what is a killer for it is drivers. I have an ADM / ATI setup, and where Unity hates fullscreen, GNOME hates ADM / ATI graphics drivers! Once I installed my proprietary driver my computer became un-usable because everything glitched out so bad!! had to uninstall it… now I don’t have hardware acceleration… sad… So I might be thinking about a KDE switch.
Yeh was nice until Canonical ceased its funding, sadly without dedicated resources pushing a distro it usually fails to reach a certain level of polish.
I reinstalled Ubuntu after a 1 year without it because I couldn’t get Backtrack5 to install properly. Like everyone else, I raged and raged at the Unity UI and after 3 hours of nervous ticks revealing themselves, I deleted the partition.
I might try it again with gnome or kde if I ever need to use ubuntu again.
Installing Gnome on Ubuntu takes only 5 minutes:
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
Then sign out, and pick the new desktop-manager while signing in.