Why doesn't Gnome3 work even after trying all these workarounds?

Let's try resetting GNOME settings to the default and see if that helps.

• How do I reset GNOME to the defaults?

I am guessing one of the configuration files in your home directory is causing these problems and removing them would possibly work for you.

Thank you original poster. The following command worked well. This did give me some errors, but at least got gnome-shell back up so I could finish up/save what I was doing and then reboot/logout.

Ctrl + Alt + F1 (or whatever shell you want) login

run the following command: gnome-shell --display=:0 --replace

Go back to X --> Ctrl + Alt + F7

And gnome-shell restarts.