When Ubuntu first switched to Unity I hated it.
But over time it got better and I got used to its concepts and I'm daily driving it to this day.
Now I even fear the day Compiz and therefore Unity stop working - it has become my DE of choice.
I love its space efficiency: the global menu bar and the local window menus (I have it configured to show the window menu when I hover the title bar) and the "task bar" on the left: I use my displays in landscape mode, so width is abundant but height is at a premium.
The grid layout shortcuts just work, something that Gnome 3 couldn't really do when I last tried it a couple of years ago.
I don't often use the HUD to activate menu entries, but it can be very nice for programs like GIMP when you remember the name of an entry but can't find it in all those submenus.
I wish Canonical would still maintain it, over the years it seems to have regressed a bit. Nowadays some (I think mostly SDL2) applications tend to slow down the whole UI and window transitions "take forever". But apart from that it has served me well. So thank you and everyone who was involved with Unity!
So true! I loved Unity in the late 2010s. Unfortunately, now where it is no more maintained and GNOME3 does not really provide the same features, I switched to KDE. What I miss most is the space efficiency and the global menu bar / searchable HUD. I miss so much time digging in menus instead of just typing and hitting enter.
