The RAGE that people is expressing in forums I feel too. Because a Linux user obviously is in Linux because they don’t want all the silliness of other OSes. In Linux I absolutely loved the way the applications menu was where every app was just two clicks away.
I tried ubuntu classic and even gnome3 (unity is a modification of the original gnome3, and in my opinion better than gnome3) but at the end I am using unity mainly to avoid possible problems.
It will start to launch all types of programs without the user even know they are running (did you see they hidden all the startup applications?!) and soon linux will be full of viruses or something…
I will take a look which one is installed by default. But the most important thing is if it has nvidia propietary driver (to run Cycles and other GPU programs and make my own tests) and I am not sure nvidia drivers are so easily installed like in Ubuntu (with the Additional Drivers app) because I don’t like to make a master in installing a driver for Linux. I will take a look this weekend to Arch Linux.
A and B) The first icon in my dash launcher is the home. I press it (a icon of an orange folder with a draw of a house on it) and nautilus opens in the home directory. Perhaps you installed something like nautilus-open-terminal or other plugin and you must uninstall them because if not your nautilus will do the most strange things (after installing nautilus-open-terminal I had weird things like closing in some folders and change of the theme of the nautilus buttons). My worry was how to open a terminal in a folder in a quick way like the nautilus-open-terminal, and I use at the moment tux commander, that has a button to launch a terminal in the folder you are at the moment.
C) The Menu of the applications is now in the upper bar for every application like in Mac, this is called Global Menu and you can get rid of Global Menu this way:
sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt
or install it again:
sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt
So to change to Icons, List or Compact go to the View Menu
I tested and it remembers for each folder if I put it in icon mode or list mode.
D) Ctr + L (or in Menu: Go/Location) and you convert from location to the button mode with Enter