GNOME these days is pretty great. Quick tap of the super key and then type to launch something. Super left, right, or up arrow to snap to the side or maximize. Ctrl-alt left/right to switch workspaces. Doing that while holding shift will move the current selected window to the next workspace.
Plus GNOME 3 introduced the concept of extensions, which are as powerful as the old Firefox extensions were. You can change literally anything about the shell to suit your needs.