Which is a pity when you think about how crappy and unfinished the unity UI in ubuntu 11.04 is. In years this is the first time I've stopped using a standard ubuntu (now I'm using Gnome 3, which is almost as bad).
You can disable Unity and switch back to Gnome 2 at login time. After you enter or click your username (before you enter your password) you can select which login session you want to use down at the bottom of the boot screen. If I remember correctly the default is "Ubuntu" but there is also a "Ubuntu - Classic" that sends you in to Gnome 2 rather than Unity.
Unity is the incarnation of everything I hated (and worked hard to disable) in Windows 7. I rebooted and selected Ubuntu Classic as the default, and haven't looked back.
At an internship at MSR I recently used windows 7 for real, and after I got through the first week the general experience was maybe more pleasant than ubuntu with unity. Even things that annoyed me at first (grouping windows by program in the task bar, for example) grew slowly.
Crunchbang isn't great. It breaks regularly; it's pretty big; and there are weird dependency problems. Compare it to distributions like Slitaz or Tiny Core, both of which really are small.
What I've done is to install Debian (you can choose testing or stable) base system. And Fluxbox / Openbox on the top of it will all the applications you need.
I'm happy with that.
