Most of your issues seem to be about Unity. I don't like it either. You should try KDE. It comes built into Kubuntu if you'd like to run it live before you comm

Most of your issues seem to be about Unity. I don't like it either. You should try KDE. It comes built into Kubuntu if you'd like to run it live before you commit. If you like the feel of older Ubuntu, I would recommend xfce, which is what I use. It has come a long way and seem to be what Gnome would be had it not made such a huge shift with Gnome 3. I think it comes built into Xubuntu but I just install it on whatever Linux I am running at the time.