I've been using XFCE the most.

I was pissed when ubuntu went with Unity and stayed with 10.04 up till 14.04 came out. I had 10.04 set up where it was updating firefox, thunderbird and the kernel and would have stayed with it until I read about flashback and tried it on a thumb drive and haven't looked back. Installed in on my SSD and am having a blast customizing it.

gnome 3 sucks as far as I'm concerned. For all intents and purposes flashback is gnome 2 on steriods.

pressing the windows and the alt key at the same time as right clicking the mouse will get you to where you can add or take away items to the panel same as with gnome2 was. I can't tell any difference between the way I have it set up and the way I had 10.04 set up. I love it

I have both installed but they only get you so far. I use compiz to cut out the animations and a couple other things that I find annoying

I don't do Unity and unless something in me changes I won't ever be either. I just flat ass don't like anything about it.

gnome sessions fastback is where its at as far as I'm concerned. It agrees with my old 2001 computer so well.

I agree with everything you say about Unity. I use Debian 7 these days basically because Ubuntu has gone so far off base since Lynx, which I have always thought was their best. I use Gnome Classic on my main computer but I've played with E17 for the fun of it. If you can get E17 to run stable it's a hell of a desktop. I have a couple of servers running 14.04 but no desktop on those. I might as well be using Debian on those too since Ubuntu comes from Debian and as a server there little difference.

Gnome-sessions-flashback.... sounds like Ubuntu is starting to listen.

Opensuse. I am working on a friend's computer and I want it to be simple. I'm a ubuntu noob myself and I was so sick of windows and their back doors and
viruses and snooping, I loaded Ubuntu into my own laptop first to see how difficult it was going to be and I found it simple, so I loaded the office and home
computers with it. I haven't had calls from the office to fix viruses or anything else for the last 5 months.

My biggest complaint with Ubuntu is the time I spend researching various bugs and glitches I have to fix to use Their system... not to mention the frustrating
needle in a haystack coding crap that I sometimes send days looking for and it cripples my hands. I have psoriatic arthritis (the family curse), and carpal
tunnel from typing for 50 years, I know it's so 1990's but I WANT TO POINT AND CLICK!

Opensuse looks amazing and it's very light and simple like Ubuntu and unlike Windows, the elephant in the room!

Actually doing a cool side project to build Slackware linked against Musl libc...