Linux is the best — my old beater laptop would probably be in the dump right now. Four years ago it was starting to throw errors and BSODs. I installed Linux on it and it has worked flawlessly ever since. Looks beaten and battered. I even had to replace the keyboard and of course the battery which I will probably have to replace again, soon.
“Don’t like the unity GUI.”
Nor do I. So, don’t use it. Both Ubuntu and Mint offer the Mate desktop environment. It runs faster than Unity and looks very much like Windows XP.