Many people formed their opinions on Unity rather early on. I think that it
deserves a fresh look when you are comparing it to Cinnamon which came out
after Unity. Likewise GNOME Shell has matured much in the same time and
much of Cinnamon's benefits comes from improved GNOME 3 and GNOME shell
extensions. I am not a regular Unity user as I am a KDE guy, but I have
used it from the start and it is night and day over that time. My opinion
is that once users get used to Unity it will knock the socks off most other
DEs. KDE excepted, or I would be using Unity.

My point about Mint users liking it better than GNOME is based on more than
just the location of the panel. The menu is different. Yes, it is a menu,
but you have to be a fan of slab menus to like it. I am not. KDE has one
and it is one of the first things that I change. It comes down to
expectations. If a GNOME user tries Mate or Cinnamon and expects it to look
like GNOME 2 then they are going to be disappointed. Since the discussion
was based on coming from a GNOME 2 perspective then that is the approach
that I took. I did not even mention KDE which is what I use as an option
because like Mate and Cinnamon it has a bottom panel and a slab menu.

I honestly think that many people would be better advised to try Unity than
go to Mate which is dead in the water -- long term. I also think that those
who like Cinnamon should look more closely at GNOME Shell on which it is
based. BTW, Unity can now run on openSuSE and Arch. It is only a matter of
time before it is on Fedora, too. It will run on smartphones and TVs. It
has lots of momentum and development power behind it. That bodes well for
it and not for other DEs. Note: I am not an Ubuntu fan or a regular Unity
user. That is the reality of having many paid full time developers and a
rich sugar daddy in Shuttleworth. I also think they have vision and
ambition.

I am not saying that you should *not* use other DEs. I use a different one.
I am saying judge things *fairly*. Do not listen to hype or base decisions
on past prejudices Try things for yourself.

You may have to adjust your workflow short term, but you can increase your
productivity using Unity once you make the adjustment. I know because I
have tried it. If you cannot make the adjustment to some parts, global
menu, overlay scroll bars, window controls on left, they are all
customizable. The Launcher and Dash are very useful. HUD works great and I
was a big critic of that in the past. There are many lenses and scopes that
you can add. These are the heart of Unity. There is an adjustment that you
have to make when moving to any new desktop environment.