IMHO, Gnome2 was great, but since then its all gone downhill. Still cursing Ubuntu for Unity.
What's annoying isn't Unity but the way Ubuntu changes the way startup scripts are done and small things like .xsession don't run by default (and if you turn them on, suddenly .Xmodmap stops working...). That's true for the Ubuntu derivatives too. But that's a fair trade-off for good drivers (even if they are proprietary) and up to date packages. Otherwise I'd go with Debian testing.
Also, installing plugins for Gnome 3 is really convenient. For example, I didn't like Alt+Tab switching between programs instead of windows, so I installed this: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/.
There are still some things that bug me though, like I don't see any way to configure the format of the Date/Time.
Give me a break.
After 3 days I just installed Awesome and went from there. Unity provides me absolutely nothing that I want that Awesome doesn't. The only thing it does for me is get in the way.
It has a very opinionated approach to things and throws away a lot of customisation options (focus follows mouse, you can't move the launcher or go back to a standard taskbar etc).
Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be thrown off the team, forever. It drove me absolutely nuts until I finally managed to get rid of it.
I use FVWM2 at work with two monitors, when I have time I plan on moving to xmonad. I've used Dropbox and a few other lightweight WMs too. They all worked OK with my dual-monitor setup.
I've used Unity at home since the beginning, and it's the single worst multi-screen experience I've ever had. I only stick with it in hopes that I'll get to watch it evolve into something useable.
I need for example right-click menues sometimes and those are simply not supported. So the only workaround is installing packages that get me applications menues back which is then a mess where the buttons to close a window switch from left to right depending on fullscreen or windows all the time. Not that I liked top-menues to start with anyway. And certainly lot's of applications just work badly with the top-menu simply because Linux-apps never were written for that. So you get stuff like double-menues even with some applications which are in the offical distro.
Or the idea to use F10 as a system key - sorry, but it just isn't one and never was. Which is why it's used by lots of applications which suddenly miss a key now - who came up with this shit?
There is one reason Ubuntu stays on my Laptop - it works most of the time good enough with the hardware. And I can live with Unity most of the time. But Unity is the reason why Ubuntu doesn't make it on my desktop.