After I switched to Ubuntu a couple years ago, I gave Unity a whirl (it being the default desktop environment), and I use it to this day. Unity is simple and i

After I switched to Ubuntu a couple years ago, I gave Unity a whirl (it being the default desktop environment), and I use it to this day. Unity is simple and it doesn't try to be the be-all and end-all of my computer use. Unity seems to be designed by people who understand that the purpose of a desktop environment is to facilitate launching other programs and perhaps moving their windows across the screen a little bit, and that's it. I am a former KDE user, and I used to spend hours and hours on end tweaking my KDE configuration. Finding that perfect equilibrium was a quest without end, but the abundant opportunities for shaping the DE to my liking didn't make me any more productive. Switching to Unity was a liberating experience. Suddenly, I could not do any of the things that KDE allowed me to do...and I didn't suffer any ill consequence as a result of that. Rather, I discovered that all I ever needed from the desktop environment was to let me run Emacs and Firefox. Everything else was, and always has been, superfluous.