I get the Unity idea is to have a common interface that will work on PC, TV, Mobile and probably other devices but they just messed up giving up on Gnome 2 way back in 10.10 and to be honest it's never been the same since. I remember the good old days of 10.04 - what a distro. Everything worked, performance was awesome and it was rock-solid. Now you try to compile something, the CFLAGS are all wrong an gcc won't recognise math.h sqrt. Whoopsie jumps up and down like it's Christmas and crappy Unity becomes a real pain (even with ALT+`) if you dare open up 3 or more windows of the same application. I know it's water under the bridge by now but I never quite got over it how you can take a great distro (10.04) and turn it into something like 14.04. Cinnamon and MATE still have some way to go. Xfce or KDE is what's left now...