Yeah, but Unity is going out of service. Ubuntu is going back to Gnome with the next release. So you would "learn" a dying desktop enviroment, and with next release everything would look different. Not so nice.
I would recommend Mint Linux for a newb. Both MATE and Cinnamon desktops are solid choices, while i would prefer MATE. Im just not about that eyecandy.
I recently thought about completely switching to linux. I wanted to install Windows in a VM and give it access to my graphicscard via VT-d, so i could play games in the VM with minimal performance loss (like 2-3%). Turns out my i5 2500k does not support VT-d
So, back to topic: My favorite Linux distro is Debian. I use it for all my personal servers, and it just works. When i need a Desktop i pretty much always choose Xfce, sinnce i like the frills approach.