Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application.
The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing.
Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity down everyone's throats by making it the default.
For the first two releases where Unity was the default, I tried to like it but had to give up within a week because it was simply too buggy, given the Compiz plugins I wished to run. (Had I used it stock, doubtless it would have worked better.)
In the third release featuring Unity, also the release where they removed the classic GNOME shell, I tried Unity again and was satisfied. It was better than the GNOME shell I had been using theretofore.
I do not believe Unity to be perfect, but I do enjoy using it more than almost any window manager. (For completely unrelated reasons, I switched to i3 a couple of months ago, but of window managers directed at normal users, Unity is certainly my favourite.)
Unity was buggy in the beginning, but it has been usable ever since 12.04 LTS. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I use for work and when I'm in OS X, I miss Unity.
The screen is uncluttered, the shortcuts are great, the dashboard is great, the various special effects are finally not nauseating, the only thing bothering me is that I can't move that launcher on the right side, but lack of customization is a problem with Gnome in general.
Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application.
The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing.
Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity down everyone's throats by making it the default.