Call me crazy, but I really like Unity. Back on windows, I always kept by taskbar on the left side anyway, and I prefer the dash search to anything else I've seen.

Me too, I prefer unity + auto-hide taskbar. At first there were some reservations until it got familiar, now anything else doesn't cut it. I hope they don't abandon it or change it drastically as is so often the way these things go.

Re Ubuntu, it helps that it works exceptionally well on anything remotely modern (6 year old PC here with SSD, won't be upgrading until it dies), and it is getting incrementally better with each release.

IMHO, Unity is by far the best DE in Linux. It has come a long way since the horrors of the first few iterations of the product.

It has some critical flaws, but it's manageable. (The worst being poor workspaces support)

Same. It looks slick, is very fast (thanks to well defined and configurable keyboard shortcuts) and easy to use.

Whatever the haters have against it, in the end I get stuff done faster and spend less time configuring my DE.

The keyboard shortcuts for snapping are so key. I really struggle to manage windows on any computer that isn't running Unity.

What I don't get is why they didn't make them match the Windows hotkeys. It was ALT+START+LEFT to stick something left, for example. Why add the ALT?

I liked the idea of Unity, but they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in so many small places I get quickly enraged using it. Ubuntu Mate for me. ;)

My favourite thing is hitting Alt and searching through menu items. It's what I miss most when using Gnome or Windows.

When I read "reinstall to upgrade" I decided Mint wasn't for me.

I use Xubuntu and it's pretty good - Ubuntu without the dumbed-down Unity stuff.

That's what happened with me on Mint. I appreciate how quickly I can re-install Linux and get everything back to how I want it, but I want that to be by choice not by design.

I decided to reinstall Ubuntu a while ago, because I was upgrading in-place since 10.10, and I decided to create a local Ansible playbook and a bash script for whatever the Ansible playbook couldn't handle.

I added it to my dotfiles repo and it's been working perfectly. Not only for installing on a new machine, but for syncing changes across computers as well. I install some new software on my laptop, I add it to my provisioning file and commit one or two of its dotfiles, and, when I move to the desktop, its entire state is one "git pull; provision" away.

I have no idea why I haven't done this earlier. Here's the playbook, if you're curious:

https://www.pastery.net/ztduxp/

Debian has always had pretty good upgrade in place abilities. I was doing that 15 year ago and it worked well; I'm not giving it up.