I tried using Unity since Ubuntu removed Gnome2. I don’t like Gnome3 so I stuck with Unity for quite some time, hoping I would get used to it. But I did not and bugs that hide the dock depending on uptime (Bug) really got me over the edge to look elsewhere. (I’m ashamed to admit I rebooted my computer many times before I even took the time to researched it.)
Now I switched to XFCE 4.10 with a gnome-session for keyring and nautilus, which I prefer to Thunar. (This german tutorial was helpful in achieving this.) I added a dock with Avant Window Navigator and changed a few key bindings. Now I’m nearly happy, there seems only one thing missing: I would like to have AWN react to Win+1…9 like the dock does on Unity or Win7.
This is how my left screen looks like. I think optics are nice and it is a useful more traditional setup than the unity stuff.