Ok, just set up Ubuntu 11.10, so far so good. VIM kept spitting out A, C, B characters when operating the arrow keys in insert mode. Strangely enough that was cured by copying /etc/vim/vimrc to $HOME/username/.vimrc. Other than that Unity kind of sucks but mostly because it is buggy. I don't know what all the hullabaloo regarding Unity is about, I rather liked it as a desktop environment once I had tweaked it into shape, but as I said it still needs a bit of work.