Personally I've tried a few distributions over the last year or so because I've been unhappy with unity but Ubuntu's ease of use still makes me return to it, although right now I'm typing this from a Debian box. I didn't like the dreadful* gnome3 speed so switched to i3. Now if I could just work out how to stop the lazy window focus...
The trouble is is that it looks like a bag of crap right now. The font rendering is all over the place, I'd be embarrassed to use this at home although it is more productive for work than anything else I've used lately.
This might all be "my fault" because I haven't properly installed the right modules or drivers or whatever, or maybe I've not properly set up my Xorg.conf or ~.i3/config but ubuntu always just worked which is why I kept returning to it.
*Possibly because this is a VM running inside windows.