I also moved away from Unity after about a year or so of using it (some good ideas, but too unstable for my taste), and instead of going Debian, which was my initial impulse, I decided to give Ubuntu Gnome a try. This is a Ubuntu variant that isn't talked about much, and it's still early days for them, but it shows some promise.

You basically get the same Ubuntu base you're used to with all the repositories and PPAs intact, which if we're being honest are probably second to none in the whole Linux landscape, with a pretty vanilla GNOME 3 stack.

The devs just put out a call for more contributors today (http://ubuntugnome.org/urgent-need-for-more-contributors), and I'd love to see this distro take off. I'm also interested in seeing how they'll handle the whole Mir situation.