I switched to Budgie Linux from a very hacked up Ubuntu (it’s a long story - it worked fine, until it didn’t, and it was all my fault - but the short is, that I started with 14.04 LTS minimal, and built it up to look and work like Crunchbang), after discovering Budgie via Solus. I didn’t like the Solus package management system, and wanted my Debian repos, etc. Good thing BL was around!
I liked the desktop because for the most part, it reminded me greatly of the MacOS desktop I have on the MBP my employer provided me. It’s simple, lightweight, and intuitive - but it still allows you just the right amount of customization without you needing to delve too deep into the weeds.
Nemo is almost a perfect file manager; there’s only one thing missing that I’d love to see:
Document Preview
It’d be nice, when you highlight (click) on an item, a preview in a panel next to the file list would appear, of whatever the document is; if a picture, it would show a thumbnail - if a PDF, it would show the first page (and allow you to page thru). It should resize and such as needed (when the window size is changed). Do this for the basic types, similar to how the Mac Finder does it. More or less show a preview for pictures, videos, PDF or similar documents, sound files (a small player?), flat text files, etc - heck, if you could work in a viewer for STL files that would be super-sweet (I bet some 3D printer folks would love to have that).
Probably just about every media type, for it’s default action, the app it should open most likely has some kind of API to create a preview; if not, adding some default app for that should be possible.
Other than that - it’s pretty much perfect; just enough to be productive, not a lot of bells, whistles, and dodads to distract you (ok, I’d love to see transparency of the file list and folders, too).