Gnome3 is great if you want to disable 4323 hotkey combinations to open their overlay (except the one that can't be disabled), and download an extension that makes it so moving the cursor over 15% of the upper left corner of the screen doesn't open the overlay.

But it is slow. The overlay barely works well on a new mid-range system. A cheap laptop that is as old as Gnome3 has no chance of running Gnome3 in a satisfying way. Even if you ignore the overlay and install dmenu (which a noob isn't going to know about) it is slower than not only other wm's for Linux, but Windows and OSX. It's not a good way to get new people interested in Linux.