This has been an interesting conversation. All I can tell you is that I find the entire phenomenon of Ubuntu and its various derivatives fascinating. And, from what I can see, Ubuntu's GNOME-based Unity desktop environment is, as emegra has said, the flagship distribution within Linux. And what makes Ubuntu's Unity DE so interesting is that it is both brilliant and flawed.
Many here have said they don't like the lack of customization options within Unity. Those here who say this are right about that. There isn't much one can customize in Unity. If however one likes the way Unity is preconfigured, then the end user is all set. My wife and I fortunately fall into this latter category. Unity's DE is very easy to use.
I do have some issues with Unity however. It can still be buggy. Last night, after updating in 14.04.2 Unity, my computer froze. I waited and waited, and then tried innumerable times to use R E I S U B -- all to no avail. I had to do a hard shutdown, and after that I had to install Peppermint and Ubuntu back onto the two hard drives I use, That was a pain. But even worse than a couple of miserable updating experiences within Unity is the bloatware factor. I happen to agree with Richard Stallman that searching within Dash, especially without knowing the trick of how to opt out of handing over your data to various commercial interests, is a form of spying on unaware users. If anything, allowing Amazon, or whatever other interested third party, to collect your search data should be an opt-in process; or, better yet, should not be in the distribution at all. With Richard Stallman, I agree on that particular point. (All those third-party plugins are bloatware and resource hogs.)
I should note I have so far found Trisquel, which is another GNOME-based Ubuntu derivative, and the FSF browser that Richard Stallman uses, to be completely un-user friendly. He would say I'm valuing convenience over privacy and freedom. But, I would say I need a distribution that works well and values privacy and freedom. Even Chromium browser, the last I knew, was considered unacceptable by Trisquel and the FSF. In my opinion, that's pushing a principle a little too far -- principled to a fault!
At the end of the day, the two most user friendly Linux distributions I've ever used are Ubuntu's Unity and Peppermint OS. In this house, we've got two Peppermint installations and one installation of Unity. And although my wife enjoys Ubuntu's DE, she prefers and runs Peppermint on her computer. I run both Peppermint and Unity*. Peppermint is easy to use, customizable, and fast. Unity is easy to use, quite intuitive, and getting faster all of the time -- despite its bloatware!
Perhaps PCNetSpec hit the nail on the head when he mentioned Canonical's boardroom. A little more listening to the valid concerns of Ubuntu's loyal and true users would be helpful in the development, and adoption, of Ubuntu's Unity DE. Time will tell what direction Unity will go from here.
*When I get tired of Unity, I switch over to Ubuntu's MATE LTS. (But, right now, I'm waiting for MATE to bump up to LTS 14.04.2. Should happen any day, I think.)
