Out of curiosity: What do you have installed on your laptop instead?
Now I run emacs on CentOS 7. I only do security updates and have been using guix to handle userspace (Userspace = mostly emacs).
For work I have an Ubuntu laptop. We code pascal, so I almost never leave the GUI. After configuring Unity I actually like it a lot. I might switch to ubuntu on their next LTS release (which, after all the kinks are worked out, will be 16.04 + ~4 months)