I used to hate Unity with a passion. But after giving it a shot, I find that its not as terrible as I originally thought.
The main reason I hated it was that you pretty much HAVE to use the keyboard to use it. Not so bad for most people, but my monitor is a 42" tv sitting across the room with my pc. I have a wireless mouse and keyboard, but I usually left the keyboard turned off and sitting on a table out of the way. Until Unity, I could access all of my applications with no more than 3 mouse clicks, and I only had to use the keyboard to enter passwords or for the occasional terminal session. Now, I leave the keyboard turned on and always accessible because I have to use it much more often to actually accomplish anything. Though I have learned that as long as I use the keyboard a lot, Unity is actually pretty decent. I still have some major gripes though.
1- Yes I can just type a few letters and the program will show up, but if I cant remember the name of the program because I only use it once in a blue moon, I need to spend 5+ minutes searching for it. I also cant get programs installed through wine to show up with a few keypresses. (Probably a PEBKAC error, but still annoying)
2- I have to jump through a few hoops to get all my app notifications to show up correctly.
3- I have 5 third party apps installed to tweak various settings in Unity that should be built in
4- I think the universal menu system is retarded. I have it turned off, but it really should be a simple checkbox in the system settings.
5- It needs a better workspace indicator. The one that is stuck on the launch bar should at least tell me what workspace I have active since I cant remove it. (I have an extra mouse button set to open workspace switching, and I have the cube set up where if I scroll on the left or right of the screen, it changes workspaces)
6- I would like the option to only show open application on the active workspace instead of always seeing all open apps on all workspaces. If its already pinned to the launchbar, the little arrows are cool, but I dont really need to see a transmission icon taking up space on my main workspace when I only have it open on workspace 4
Wow, that was more than I thought there would be. After all of that, I still use it because I feel that it has promise, it just needs more polish. I believe that by 13.10 it should be fully featured enough to be a worthy successor to Gnome 2.