For those who don't like Unity, give GNOME 3 a try. GNOME 3 replaces GNOME 2 in Oneiric because the GNOME team deprecated GNOME 2; it wasn't Canonical's doing, it's just coincidental timing. But it's an interesting improvement.

For those who think they don't like GNOME 3, be aware that there are several packages that you need to install to open up its full potential and make it customizable. (I'm not sure I would like it without these.)

The GNOME 3 packages are not installed by default (probably because Canonical is pushing people to use, and provide feedback for, Unity), but they are in the Ubuntu repositories. And it's not obvious what to install... Here's what I've found so far:

gnome-shell
gnome-shell-extensions-common
gnome-shell-extensions-user-theme
gnome-tweak-tool
gnome-themes-standard
gnome-sushi

If you install these with "apt-get install ", it will fully install GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 11.10 and allow you to customize it with themes, control its behavior, and determine what is visible, etc.

Be aware that you will need to log out and back in for most of these packages to be picked up by the system and applied to your GNOME 3 desktop.

One "hidden" function that you'll want to know about: Hold down the Alt key to turn "Suspend" into "Shut Down", which brings up a menu for restarting or powering off.

Pretty much everything else you can discover by playing around with the interface. It's different, sure, but it's also more efficient for many things -- and it's obviously designed to be "finger driven", meaning it's being angled towards tablet use. That's good; Unity is also intended for that. But I think GNOME does a much better job of also working well on Desktops with mice & large multiple monitors.

The only thing I haven't yet figured out how to do is how to add icons for manually-installed apps.