You can disable Unity and switch back to Gnome 2 at login time. After you enter or click your username (before you enter your password) you can select which login session you want to use down at the bottom of the boot screen. If I remember correctly the default is "Ubuntu" but there is also a "Ubuntu - Classic" that sends you in to Gnome 2 rather than Unity.

Correction: Ubuntu WAS ready for prime time

Unity is the incarnation of everything I hated (and worked hard to disable) in Windows 7. I rebooted and selected Ubuntu Classic as the default, and haven't looked back.

At an internship at MSR I recently used windows 7 for real, and after I got through the first week the general experience was maybe more pleasant than ubuntu with unity. Even things that annoyed me at first (grouping windows by program in the task bar, for example) grew slowly.

Ubuntu moving to Unity and Gnome3 forced me to give Xubuntu a try; I like it ok. xfce is like a less-polished Gnome2.

dito moved away from ubuntu and found crunchbang linux, because of unity

Crunchbang isn't great. It breaks regularly; it's pretty big; and there are weird dependency problems. Compare it to distributions like Slitaz or Tiny Core, both of which really are small.

What I've done is to install Debian (you can choose testing or stable) base system. And Fluxbox / Openbox on the top of it will all the applications you need. I'm happy with that.

thanks for mention them, i'm going to try both of them :D

I'm happy with Lubuntu and Xubuntu variants. Maybe give those a try.

You should try out Mint Linux. It's basically a fork of Ubuntu with a much better UI (in my opinion).