It's Ubuntu so with the permament dock tbf. They only came to me with problems stemming from the fact that we were forced to use the deprecated AFS with hacky workarounds, or them trying to install software which they didn't have permissions to do, or the printer being out of paper
Finding the activities button in the top left on default gnome is the only hurdle I can think of. The all apps button, the calendar/notifications and quick settings are all obvious things to try clicking which will immediatly reveal their purpose
I disagree with your take on gnome, I think it's super simple and easy to understand, especially with how similar it works to phone OSs. My uni has gnome running in the computer pool and none of the hundreds of win and mac people coming in have problems with it
Well tEcHnIcAlLy...