Now, when I have to wait a whole second for the menus to appear when I press the windows/command key, typing into the search box has huge delays, scroll bars are a mess when using the touchpad, the desktop is unusable using nvidia 173 drivers, etc. I start looking at alternatives.

Right now I’m satisfied with Gnome Shell in Oneiric with a few tweaks, like removing the overlay scroll bars and adding tracker UI to the launcher (cause it’s not yet integrated properly into the shell). But for the 12.04 release I will probably research other distros cause Unity is, frankly, a mess, and I don’t want to deal with it anymore.

Simply not true. Everyone, who does show enough style to not just drop to floor brawling, after login to unity was soon delighted by Unity’s gifts for the keyboard affine user. This shell got a little more functionality as just “Apps,Places,System”. What a pity, that some users condemn the whole thing because they can’t move the dock to another screen edge.

Stop shouting until you at least got a fine glimpse of what you’re ranting about.

For those of you who are trying to excuse Unity by saying that the Core functions need to be perfected before customization can come, you need to realize that no other products can be realized functioning so poorly and expect to be successful. Windows Me was panned for functioning so badly and had to be replaced quickly. Atari 5200 was a failure because it tried to replace the excellent 2400 model with poorly functioning hardware and software which did not move to a new generation of video gaming. You can’t replace a popular and well-functioning product with a half-broken and low-function and expect to be successful. Go ahead and releas Unity along with a Gnome2 option: no one is telling you not to, but to leave us twisting in the wind is Netflix-level of incompetence.

Canonical deserves to lose a chunk of their users because they took away the gold and left crap in its place.

Unity is just retarded though and it treats all users as simpletons.

We used Linux for the first time when we both a Dell laptop with Ubuntu 8.04. My wife hated it so much she begged me to put Windows 98 on it. She called it the ugliest and most depressing desktop since Win95 and our older son called the brown heavy look “The Brown Noise” (South Park reference).
Had my nephew not informed me of other desktops, we would have left Linux after two months on Gnome.

So I have no love lost for the Mac clone.

But Unity is just an insult to my intelligence (or of old ladies, my mom, mominlaw and 5 aunts are all over 75 and have learned to use Linux in the past year and Firefox, email and Skype daily. Its not harder for them) and none of the kids want to use it.

But thats the wonderful thing about free software desktops: there is plenty of choice in distros and desktops to suit everyones tastes (but I prefer those that let you configure your deskopt how YOU want it because NO ONE knows better waht you want.)