I started off my Linux life with Gnome desktop, until Unity happened. That’s when I moved to KDE, as both Gnome and Unity were in the very early stage of development. Another problem with Gnome was its reliance on 3rd party extensions for full functionality — and extensions break with each new release of Gnome.
Many of Gnome’s core components, including Nautilus, lack some basic capabilities (like batch file renaming). So as much as I admired their work, I never became a Gnome user again.
But things are changing. The upcoming 3.20 release of Gnome seems promising and developers are vowing that extensions won’t break anymore. Also they may bring the feature of batch file renaming.
On top of that, Gnome’s awesome integration with email, calendar and contacts make it a pleasant desktop to use. And don’t forget the ability to mount Google Drive as a remote drive.
Gnome is available on all major desktop environments, but openSUSE seems to offer the best Gnome experience out of the box. Ubuntu Gnome is also a great distribution to try.