To be fair, if he had started with Debian it probably would have just worked perfectly. It includes Gnome 3 by default, and meets all their other requirements.
I doubt it would have worked perfectly. As I said, my keyboard problem happened on all distros until I switched to the magic USB port of happy typing. Other than that, no idea, really. I quite like Debian in principle. Maybe I'll try it on my Laptop. Most articles I read suggested that one should get started with a more newbie-centric distribution and advance to something like debian or arch once a decent understanding of the system and especially not-just-basic usage of the shell is acquired. How are things in Debian land currently from a user experience point of view? Would you say it requires a decent understanding of manual system configuration to get a working system going?