I'm having trouble with a dual display on 11.10 also. I have an ATI
display card with a digital and a vga port. I was able to get it
working by not activating the propitiatory display driver. The dual
display is working great but I can't configure the special effects in
Compiz but I'm willing to go with the plain set up as long as the dual
display system works. I can't live without it.

You are mistaking the version, 11.10, with Unity, the default desktop
environment. You can get the benefits of the upgrade and use another DE. You
can install GNOME Shell or get the fallback of GNOME with the old panel
which is as close as you are going to get. Ever. GNOME Classic is near the
end of its shelf life, not Ubuntu's decision BTW.

People who do not like Unity have options, besides sticking with an old
version. LTS users do not have to upgrade to 11.10. They can upgrade
directly to 12.04 when it comes out next April. Users of other versions must
follow the 6 month cycle and go from 11.04 - 11.10 -12.04 or do a clean
install. With 12.04 GNOME Classic will be DOA pretty much with every distro
but Debian which is 2 years behind the times. Get used to it.

Users might as well upgrade now and use a different DE and try Unity as
well. I think that you need to give it at least a week. You may like out
more than you think. If not, then you will have given an honest effort. You
can always fallback to the panel version or even try KDE or XFCE which
continue to use the old desktop motifs.

I'm starting to really like Unity. You just have to get to know where
to move the cursor to see where the screen controls are. Like to see
the X to exit a screen you have to make sure that the screen is the
current view by clicking somewhere on that screen. Or moving the cursor
over to the launch pad to see those buttons. I got the dual monitor
working by not selecting the proproitory driver for the ATI. It doesn't
look like I'm missing anything without the driver.

Actually there were 2 drivers. The one that was labeled post install
updates wouldn't even load. So there must be something wrong with the
ATI drivers.

It is nice to here some praise for Unity. Despite the grumbling (mine), I
think that Unity is very good .... for some users. It works best for power
users who like a simple, uncluttered desktop and love hotkeys (there are
lots of them). I don't like to type (despite my long posts here) and do
everything that I can to avoid it. I am very visual so textual material is
harder for me to remember. It is also better for new users who come from a
smartphone or tablet background. It is very intuitive if you do not have to
un-learn past habits. Lots of hard work has gone into Unity in the past year
(less actually) to make it on par with or better than GNOME Shell which had
a big head start. Kudos to Canonical and the team.

I think that it is the future of OSes. OS/X Lion and Windows 8 are similar
experiences. Canonical foresaw this and was quick off the mark.This caught
many (most?) users off guard and they took it as a slight. What? Canonical
was abandoning them? They approached Unity (many and still do) with a
negative attitude. You can't hope to like something if you have already made
up your mind. GNOME 2.x is history. Most users do not want to recognise
that. They blame Ubuntu, but should blame GNOME. When you compare Unity with
GNOME's offering (Shell) then you see that both see the trend towards simple
and scalable interfaces. They can work well on different desktop sizes and a
variety of devices. They are simple and screen reading is kept to a minimum.
Menus are out. Launchers and the Dash are in. Multitasking still works, but
it is much simplified. GNOME Shell works only in full screen, like Android.
Unity allows for more than one window on a single screen, but has the global
menu which confuses things. It is a compromise and that does not work for
me. In trying to keep it simple and clean they have also opted
for disappearing launchers, scroll bars and menus that only show when you
mouse over them. This is more work for the desktop user who has to move the
mouse to the menu when they want to see something and if there are two
windows on the screen you add a click to switch focus. So there is reason to
grumble, but if you can get past it you can see what they are striving for
and be impressed at the achievement.

I am still a KDE user. However, at some point KDE will move in that
direction, too. I hope that they fork it or still allow for different
experiences like they do now with Activities. If you are a netbook user then
you can use a different Activity called Search and Replace instead of the
default desktop. Switching activities is just a mouse click or keystroke
away. You do not have to logout, reboot or install anything. Think of it as
having Unity but being able to press shift-mousewheel on the desktop or
shift-right-click on the desktop and choose Activities from a drop down
menu. Then you could be in a classic desktop. You can't do this in any other
DE that I know of but KDE which is one of many reasons that I love it so
much. I could switch to Unity, but KDE makes is hard when it is so good.