So I finally gave in and installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my desktop computer. Until now it was running Ubuntu 11.04, because I loathe Unity and Gnome 3 but I was starting to feel the need to have more up-to-date libraries and programs.

Fortunately I found out that I can avoid going insane, having the "classic" Gnome interface with pretty much the same look-and-feel as I was used to from Gnome 2, with a very simple change:

sudo apt-get install gnome-sesion-fallback

Once that was installed, I logged out and on the login screen I clicked the gear symbol and selected "GNOME Classic" as my session.

Done!

There's another thing but I'm putting it into a separate post to make it more evident.