For what is worth, on my old laptop, after Ubuntu switched to Unity I hated every bit of it and nothing made it better with every version I tried. The main pro

For what is worth, on my old laptop, after Ubuntu switched to Unity I hated every bit of it and nothing made it better with every version I tried. The main problem was that the interface was sluggish. Switching to Unity 2D made it better, but on the other hand Unity 2D was missing functionality and still sluggish compared to Xfce. But I just got a new laptop. It's a Thinkpad with an Intel HD 4000 graphics card and everything just worked out of the box - graphics, wifi, web cam, sound, everything. And funny thing, now I like Unity and in fact the problem with my old laptop was the graphics card I was using - some kind of Geforce and thinking about it, all the problems I ever had can be traced back to it and the proprietary drivers I kept installing. My old laptop is still around and so I gave the Nouveau drivers a chance. I was surprised at how well Nouveau worked with Unity. So a word to the wise if you want to try out Unity or Gnome Shell ... (1) prefer Intel HD graphics over Geforce and if that's not an option (2) give Nouveau a try!