Yes, yes yes! That's fantastic! I hate Unity and I love GNOME. Good choice. Too bad it's going to be April 2018 until then, but this should teach anyone: It's never too late to revert a stupid design decision!
Now imagine if 6 years ago Canonical had spent all that time and effort into improving existing DEs and implementing Wayland-support instead of their (already then) NIH initiatives.
Where would we all be now? Certainly not still stuck in this same, unimproved X11 sinkhole (yes yes, apart from Fedora-users, I know).
Such a shame they had to spend more than half a freakin decade to realize their mistake.
I don't think Canonical was unusual in having a failed investment.
I really don't care about it being X11 under the hood, I care about the sidebar on the left being gone.
I think that had they made its position configurable as half the Internet asked for since the start, Unity would have been way less hated.
Anyway, there's still a top bar, the one that has the clock and so on. Two bars doesn't save space.
First of all, I am a Windows user 95% of the time. But when I wanna spin up a VM or Linux distro real quick, Ubuntu is my choice. Of course, if I use it longer, I will install KDE or something like that. But with lots of window managers, I noticed instabilities or redundancies (e.g. there's a Unity and a GNOME service running for the same thing). It's best to use a distro with the window manager it comes with. Which was Unity on Ubuntu, but will finally be GNOME again.
Does the desktop on Linux have a viable future?