After checking out various Linux distros, I think I've decided to switch to Fedora as I think it will be an easy change from Ubuntu. Is anyone currently running Fedora? What are your thoughts? Anything I should be worried about?
Nope, it's the highest quality packaging of any distro, even though it's the most bleeding edge of any distro, it's also remarkably stable.
I use Fedora on almost everything as daily driver. I use CentOS for servers, RHEL on workstations and a couple of servers, and arch/slackware to fool around with, and momentarily use opensuse 13.1 on a couple of netbooks for daily use and one server, but fedora is on all my laptops and desktops. The only inconvenience I've had in the last years was with nVidia proprietary drivers, that won't compile kernel modules so I have to reboot with the older kernel version (which is still much more recent than any other distro at that point and which is like a 30 second loss of time), but Fedora always reponds really fast with patches, so the availability and efficiency has been great throughout the years.
I use the XFCE version for the moment, I'll switch back to the Gnome version when Gnome is done doing stupid stuff, or may stick with XFCE and wait for Hawaii. I use the whisker menu in XFCE, I don't miss Gnome that much.
I don't like the direction that Ubuntu is going. I do like the Unity dock though. There are a couple plugins for Gnome three that I like, Dash to dock, and Intellihide.
Yeah, extensions save Gnome pretty much, but the problem of Gnome is not in the looks or the very easy to use interface, the problem of Gnome is in nautilus having lost some functionality it should have kept and in some bloatware like facebook e.a. integration that nobody uses, etc...
I prefer DE's that keep out of my way but have great functionality, so I use a very thin XFCE taskbar with a lot of applets, and the whisker menu bound to the Super-key for easy application search access. I have the same functionality in the XFCE taskbar with applets as I would in Gnome with extensions, but it stays out of my way more and is faster. It doesn't have the same degree of font optimization as Gnome and doesn't have the same stunning modern looks a finetuned Gnome Shell is capable of, but it just does the job and doesn't get on my nerves.
Gnome and KDE are the most popular DE's in linux, but they're not the best ambassadors for linux in my opinion, they often get on my nerves, not as much as Windows, but still more than enough to not use them all the time.