I too disliked Unity at first when it reared its head in 11.04 (didn't help that it still had some obvious bugs), but I gave it a try and have grown to like it

I too disliked Unity at first when it reared its head in 11.04 (didn't help that it still had some obvious bugs), but I gave it a try and have grown to like it a lot. They've polished it up quite a bit in 11.10 and it's even better now. I definitely would not want to go back to the old menu-driven way. (I would add that most people I know that use Ubuntu are of the same opinion) Fully agree about the config hell, though. One time I wanted to back up my gnome terminal profile settings using gconftool, to discover that the terminal settings are stored in the middle of an XML file that covers a whole slew of gnome settings. So to do the backup/restore, I would either have to back up all of my gnome settings, or write a custom script to patch just the section of the XML file I need changed.