I like Unity. Gives me more vertical space, which is somewhat limited (1080) versus horizontal, which I have enough of (3600.)
But really, who cares. I interact with the desktop manager for about 15 seconds after I reboot and never again. Everything I need is always open on one of the three workspaces I utilize (which means I have one entire workspace free, and to be honest my second and third are pretty under-utilized.)
For my day to day use, the major plus is the new super-key functionality. I've found it's even better than Gnome-Do at figuring out what I want within just a few characters. It's really made me re-think the way I interact with computers. Instead of trying to figure out where something should be under a bunch of hierarchical menu trees, I just start typing in what I think the final destination should be named and it pops right up. Saves time.
The major minus is that I can't right click on my Chromium icon to see how many Chromium windows I have open, and kill whichever ones I want from there like I could with AWN. Most people probably wouldn't run into this one often, but it was nice, and I miss it.
The overreaction in the Linux community is hard to understand. The whole reason I use Linux is because it's so easy to make it exactly the way I want it. Cannonical moves the X button? Less than two minutes to Google and fix. Apple moves the X button? It's there forever. My heart is not exactly breaking for anyone who is using Linux long enough to miss Gnome and has to type in "sudo apt get install gnome" six months from now on a theoretical new machine. (Or, God forbid, stop downloading CD images and get the DVD.)
I like that Cannonical experiments. I like that they're willing to piss off old school projects and invest in projects they can shove in a new direction. If I wanted boring, I know where to get CentOS. If I want adventure, I know where to get Gentoo. I like the middle ground of Ubuntu.
