I was a happy Ubuntu user, until Gnome Shell arrived! It was new, it was shiny. And it provided all those things that I needed. I mostly used the compiz expo plugin to switch between tasks. I would set-up my top-left corner as a hot corner to trigger expo and use docky for my favourite apps. When I tried Gnome Shell 3.2, it was quite similar, expect the dock was on left. But that didn’t hamper my experience. I initially used docky and awn, but finally got rid of it.
So how this is related to Fedora Utils? Because that was the time when everything changed. Gnome Shell wasn’t available on Ubuntu. Even if one could install from PPA, it would cause problems. So I made the switch to Fedora, which provided my preferred experience.