I am a huge sucker for not wasting screen estate as well. I also am highly annoyed by anything on my screen that can blink or is animated or anything that is no

I am a huge sucker for not wasting screen estate as well. I also am highly annoyed by anything on my screen that can blink or is animated or anything that is not part of whatever I am working on. So taskbars and notifications highly annoy me. I really thought windows 8 could go I the right direction. A metro like approach where applications can take up as screen as possible, with proper tiling and a unobtrusive way ala Mac finder to access everything that is not already open from a single place. However that is exactly what gnome Shell is. Max screen estate, snappy getting to everywhere and everything.