Gnomad wrote:82_28 just install Linux Mint 12 for your Dad. They take their packages from Ubuntu, and they support both MATE - the Gnome 2 fork so you can keep on using regular, plain vanilla old Gnome 2, and
Well, becuase everything's been renamed to MATE it's a bit difficult to add for example, custom panel applets. Makes it all harder to tweak, which to my mind was always the big strength of Gnome 2.
Cinnamon, that converts Gnome 3 to look like Gnome 2. I jumped ship to Mint 11 and Mint 12 after the Unity madness. I am still using Mint 11 in my daily workstation use, but have already installed Mint 12 on another partition, together with Cinnamon, so I can transition smoothly when I need to.
Cinnamon isn't actually like Gnome 2, though. It's just been slightly changed to make gnome-shell look more like Mint's version of Gnome 2, although not the Ubuntu version. You still have to abandon Cinnamon if you want to, for example, put a panel at the top instead of the bottom.
Mint also seems to make it difficult to install PPAs, in that they install with the distribution id "lisa" rather than "oneiric", so you have to edit the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ to make them work. I'm technically using Pinguy 11.10 Shell Beta, based on Mint, but with unity.
Edit: ha, just now read that you are beginning to like Unity. Well. I won't even bother, too much hassle changing how I work with the desktop, it is pretty much customized in any case to not resemble any of the ready-made paradigms. Use a different panel and window manager too. Gnome 3 on the other hand has some interesting things, others, not so much. I like what Mint and Cinnamon have done with it, though.
Cinnamon will supposedly evetually allow you to move the panel, change the order in which the panel applets appear, and so on, might be worth a look then. But Unity doesn't use a "different" window manager, it uses Compiz, which you can also use with MATE, or gnome-fallback, or for that matter Xfce, or even e17 with ecomorph. In fact I've been experimenting with a Compiz standalone session. Obviously with Mint and a Compiz standalone you can use mate-panel for a traditional panel, or unity2d-panel, or whatever else takes you fancy.
Also tried KDE, and it is a pretty powerful desktop, with the "Activities" that are their own virtual desktop areas that you can completely configure. You could have an Activity for every task you do, for example, one activity for video editing, with everything you use for that set up there, and another one for web browsing, and yet another for writing a novel.
http://maketecheasier.com/use-kde-plasm ... 2010/09/01
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/kdes-deskt ... ard-linux/
I still find KDE highly aggravating. I most use Slackware with ratpoison, which isn't really suitable for an old man with relatively little computer experience, and I keep an Ubuntu install to follow the new features, like HUD in Unity, and to experiment with things like Compiz standalone sessions. If I was introducing something to a noob I'd probably go with Bodhi, although I like CrunchBang.
Just Openbox with nothing else, a blank desktop and a right-click menu.