Unity could have been something great if only Ubuntu had decided to release it after thorough QA testing and polishing. First impressions are everything, and Ubuntu chose to release Unity in an objectively unfinished state. They effectively made their entire userbase their beta-testers. I for one have work to get done, and I'm not interested in being the subject of a grand UI experiment--especially one that's run by what seem to be a group of UX amateurs.

Ubuntu wasted that crucial first impression and alienated a significant portion of their core userbase--tech geeks and programmers--by pushing a half-baked product. Who knows: if I had tried Unity in 2014 instead of in Natty, maybe I would have liked it and recommended it.

Unity is just a symptom of the deeper problem, though, which is that Ubuntu is never in a finished, polished state. I tell anyone who asks what OS I'm using that I use Ubuntu, but that they should stick with Windows because Ubuntu invariably breaks every 6 months and everything is half-baked.

I just can't recommend an OS where the most important part, the DE, is buggy and unfinished, and where every distro upgrade reliably introduces random and serious regressions. (Though to be fair it's often upstream's fault on those.) I know that if I install Ubuntu for my mom, she'll click 'Upgrade to Ubuntu xx.yy' without thinking, then she'll call me because her computer won't hibernate any more, or because all of a sudden her window buttons are on the left. If a hard-core geek like me won't recommend the friendliest Linux distro, who will?