[Greysard]

Ubuntu felt the need to inflict Unity on its users in the last long term support release. It's incredibly uglly in the same ways as Win8; I shed it first thing for Gnome3/Cairo.

I had the same issues with Unity, and I abandoned Ubuntu Desktop in favor of Mint/KDE. "From Freedom Came Elegance" - very apt [-get.] Ubuntu maintainers were told more than once that Unity is not needed or wanted. Unfortunately, it was pushed through for about the same reasons that foisted Metro|Modern upon hapless Windows users.

[Mycroft Holmes]

Mint seems like the right choice for a new user of Linux. I haven't heard any complaints about it yet. But, inertia is a mighty force and Ubuntu is comfortable now that it works exactly the way I want.

[Lexinom]

XUbuntu with the XFCE desktop serves me well. I do most of my work in the shell anyways.

Unity: Boooooo!