Stock Ubuntu for the most part. Sublime or atom as text editor. Kraken or Git Gui for source control GUI. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox for web browser. Very little else is really needed. Although I use Gimp, Blender, and Skype (which works poorly on Ubuntu unfortunately.)
What kind of thing do you have trouble with under Linux?
Personally I find Windows very hard to use because there's no central way to update installed software on it.
On the system side I love linux. Updating all software with one command is great, but isn't connected to the GUI. In fact, I find the Ubuntu software center so hard to use that I always revert back to the terminal to install/update software. And that's what I meant with my original post. I love the functionality that Linux offers, but for many day-to-day tasks having a GUI can make life easier. And that's where Linux always disappoints me.
GNOME has a javascript extension library at http://extensions.gnome.org/ to easily tweak it to your preference. It's also easily themable using CSS, I was using the ARC theme (https://github.com/horst3180/arc-theme)
(I actually ended up using XFCE and then AwesomeWM, so maybe I'm not the market for Elementary!)
EDIT: just checked and their newest release, Loki, is based on Ubuntu's 2016 LTS. I'll be taking another look at it this evening!
The Pantheon desktop is beautiful, and it deserves all the praise it gets. I maintain hope that the eOS team will work on disentangling Pantheon from the rest of eOS once they finish stabilizing the core OS so that it can be ported to other distros. Ideally I'd eventually have Fedora running on my laptop with Pantheon strictly as the DE.
I installed the latest version (Loki) for a couple of months ago and except from 1 issue with "wobbling" mouse cursor (resolved by installing some xorg components) it works great.
I had some troubles with the previous version (Freia, I believe), more specifically the desktop manager would frequently hang. Luckily that haven't happened once in Loki.
All of the tools I use on my Windows box are availble for Linux as well: Netbeans, Jetbrains Pycharm, GitKraken, Chrome, Slack, Dropbox etc.
The only thing holding me back from switching primary OS on my desktop computer is gaming.
Didn't you experience any problems with that? Now I'm back again running Windows and terminal sessions to linux machines (for testing/deployment). I wonder if it's just me who can't work with it, but I have the feeling that developing a functional and yet simple GUI is perhaps as hard as the kernel itself. And most linux machines are servers, so there's little incentive, while Microsoft and Apple have spent billions on developing this over the years.