It might be of interest to mention a few things here 1) Gnome Shell when installed along side Unity will have the Unity style 'rollover' scrollbars. These can

It might be of interest to mention a few things here 1) Gnome Shell when installed along side Unity will have the Unity style 'rollover' scrollbars. These can be disabled, but that setting is desktop wide, so you lose the rollover scrollbars in your Unity session 2) Gnome Classic is a reasonable facsimile of Gnome 2 UI for end users who do not require extensive panel customisation or lots of applets. I'm thinking of the army of people who will upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04.4 to 12.04.x over the next year or so. I've tested the 'software update' upgrade process from 10.04 to 12.04 and it works really well. When 12.04 is released, the software update application in all 10.04 installations will provide a 'distribution upgrade' button. I imagine a lot of people will get a bit of a shock when they upgrade, go and have coffee and come back to Unity! 3) Unity2d is rather nice in my opinion and avoids the compiz issues that people sometimes see depending on their hardware. Unity2d now has HUD which is interesting. 4) If you install 12.04 command line from the netinstall iso, you can just apt-get gnome-core and get a relatively stock gnome-shell/gnome-classic desktop. You need to install some sound libraries and then choose your applications.