If you want something similar to, and relatively compatible with, Gnome 2, then I suggest you try XFCE. It's a nice environment and it supports many Gnome Panel applets and such. It's actively developed. Gnome 2 is deprecated and is going away from all distros.
Best Answer
Ubuntu 11.10 includes GNOME 3 GTK+3 libraries with the updated Unity user interface.
If you want, you can install GNOME Shell using these directions: