I also come from a windows background and I love unity. To me the stale concept of drop down/up menuing systems has always been less than usable.

They work ok for individual applications but for running a desktop, it's a lot of wasted effort. I much rather just type the first few letters of an app and go.

I do not get why the big desktop distros are just supposed to repeat M$ style menus. It seems a lot to me that people just want to stay stuck in the past using a less optimized system because it feel comfortable.

Unity is hardly metro.