I am a long time Ubuntu user. I have been using Ubuntu exclusively since the 8.04 release, and I have been using it on at least one of my PC's since the 5.04 release. I'll admit when the new Unity interface was released I was intrigued. I wanted to give it a shot. So I eagerly upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04. This was somewhat of a rude awakening, but I kind of expected that knowing Unity was coming.
It was a little buggy and totally lacked any sort of customization. I worked with it, and I really tried hard to give it a shot. I even got used to it enough that I tolerated the things about it I detested. I do not like the how the menus always appear in the top panel. I like how those menus are only visible when you mouse over them even less. I do not like dash, it is clunky, and I do not want to type to use my system application menu. I hate those annoying floating scroll bars. Despite all these issues I used Unity for 6 months during 11.04 release.
Fast forward to the Ubuntu 11.10 release. I was hopeful that Unity would have a bit more polish and customization available. Well, it does not, and it is less stable on top of it all. I am experiencing random crashes and unable to resume from suspend. After a few days dealing with it and installing updates hoping that would fix the stability issues I gave up and started using Unity 2D. Unity 2D is much better than regular Unity, stability-wise. Suspend/resume works without issue, and I don't really miss the effects. But now, what few customizations that were available via the compiz config settings manager Unity plugin are gone because Unity 2D is not running compiz.
This is about the time I got totally fed up. I have used Linux exclusively since 2000 or so and this Unity transition has just disgusted me to the point that I needed to make a change. I really didn't feel like reinstalling my machines to move to another distribution (luckily my other PC's are on the Ubuntu LTS release cycle and I don't have this issue them yet). Despite this I downloaded and burned a Debian install CD. I used Debian for a few years before switching to Ubuntu, I know Debian is great. You just have to do a few extra configurations as a desktop user. But as a last resort before doing a fresh install of Debian I decided to try some other window managers in my Ubuntu 11.10 install.
First, I tried KDE. It's not my first time using KDE. It works, but I feel like I would have to switch to all KDE apps and in general it's just not my favorite environment. This only lasted a day or two, I decided not to stay with KDE.
Next, I tried XFCE. XFCE is pretty good. It does everything I want, and runs GTK apps (to be fair KDE does too, they just don't quite look right in KDE). I felt like XFCE lacked a little polish, for example the lock screen defaults to the old looking X lock screen not some skinned lock screen. This is not a deal breaker, but I really felt the Linux desktop could be much more polished and complete.
The next step was to try Gnome 3 also know as Gnome shell. The first few hours I used this, I did not like it, in fact I hated it. I was looking for my taskbar with my open windows, I wanted to see a menu, I wanted to add launchers to the top bar like in Gnome 2. But after a day or two of forcing myself to use it, it really started to grow on me. I found I didn't miss the taskbar so much. I found I liked how the workspaces were automatically added. I liked the application menu, because all the apps were there with big icons in one big list. I found them easy to find, and if I wanted to drill down based on categories I could (I never use this feature).
At this point I'm about a week into using Gnome 3 and I think I am going to stick with it for while. I am comfortable with it already, and it is just starting to feel slick and modern. I'm pretty frustrated with Ubuntu as a distribution for moving the default UI to Unity, but at least I have a way to use a usable desktop now. So for now I am sticking with my Ubuntu installation and Gnome 3. I will say I am still considering moving back to Debian long term, but I may have to wait until the next stable release now, so I can keep Gnome 3.
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