So after all the issues I had with my computer, I decided I had nothing to lose and set up a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu. After tearing my hair for a couple of days i am now more comfortable. I´s alot better than when I tried it last (mayb e 5-6 years ago) but there are still things that make me groan. Anyway…
I wasn´t totally put off by the Unity desktop but it didn´t feel entirely right either, so I installed Docky and disabled the unity launcher. i like that you still can open the search window by pressing the windows button. I also disabled the Amazon thing. Not because of the tinfoil hat but more because the advertisements annoyed me visually, lol.
I like the top panel, and that you can chose to have the application menu show up either in the unity top panel or in the application itself. Saves a bit of space, even if a 1080p desktop isn´t really cramped.
Docky is a really neat launcher that you can customize to your own liking (yes, you can even make it look like the OSX dock). I tried the cairo dock first, but I disliked the menus that kept popping up in the top left and right corners that duplicated Unity´s own.
I try to keep my desktop as light on the eyes as possible, but rather than just have a plain color background, I found some really nice, simplistic and eyepleasing wallpapers on http://simpledesktops.com/ not just Linux related, but anyway.
One nice piece of customizability is to be able to install more than one desktop environment, that you can switch between at the logon window. I tried LXDE, XFCE, Openbox, Mate and Cinnamon. And although some of them certainly felt snappier, they all had aspects that didn´t appeal to me. I probably could have customized more, but I stuck with Unity. If you have less ram they are definitely appreciated, though. I am wondering though, if Blender might run a bit faster in Openbox without the snazzy UI effects since my Graphics card isn´t the greatest (geforce 405)
As for Blender, I tried the good ole BWM render benchmark and got about 20% speedup when compared to in Windows so that was definitely a boon! No surprise though, since Cycles was created on the GCC compiler.
I also installed Krita (of course), Mypaint and the Gimp.
All in all, I spend more time in Linux right now, as I get more comfortable. There still some software that warrants keeping Windows around (yes, I will give Wine a go too)
That´s all
Ps. does anyone know how to pin blender to the Docky launcher when not installed but just unzipped into a folder?