There is a 'non-linux' version of ubuntu?

Gnome classic......amazing how even people who have a problem with canonical/ubuntu still use the ubuntu terminology. Gnome 2.X, not 'gnome classic'. Gnome classic is what canonical renamed 'gnome-fallback' in a vauge and vain effort to stop people leaving for other distros.

MATE should be fairly close to gnome 2.X. I cant say for sure, I didn't spend enough time on gnome 2.X or on MATE to know.

If this isnt a rant/troll post, it would be good to explain in more detail what you dont like about MATE.

Please dont use out of support, end of life OSes.

if you really have to have a *ubuntu with gnome 2.X, use 10.04. Its at least supported currently, unlike 10.10....

Smells like a troll.

And I have used most of them did not like mate ( comes out as a off shoot of Mint ( that's what the splash screen said ) I even have the DVD of Mint I have tried several other versions but I have used Ubuntu for about 2 years now kinda got to like it as it kept getting better right up to 11.10 that is where it went weird with the floating Icons . . And that is where I tried lots of fixes for the problem . . And until they bring back sanity to the group who is in charge of writing the code . . Maybe I should re write Mate to put the stuff in the right places LMAO wonder it they would get pissed !

jackie;

Is there a question we can help you with?

I think you are confusing some things here. It seems to me that you mix up desktop environments and distributions. There are distributions like Ubuntu and Mint and about 600 others. Distributions are a compilation of packages fit together to build an OS. One part of the OS is the graphical environment, which contains usually a window manager or desktop environment. For your case let's focus on desktop environments. There are several of them, like Unity, Gnome 2 and 3, KDE 4, MATE, XFCE, LXDE, Trinity and may be some I have forgotten. Only Unity (the new Ubuntu default interface you dislike) is in some way bound to a distribution, all other desktop environments (DEs) are able to run on any distribution. Having said that, MATE is not an offshot of Mint, but Mint has a version that comes with MATE pre-installed (like other distributions, too, Salix for example). MATE is a fork of Gnome 2 (the previous Ubuntu default interface) you can just ditch Unity and install Mate on your Ubuntu instead. Or XFCE, which also resembles Gnome 2 somewhat. Or you choose a distro that comes with a DE that you like by default, there are plenty of Ubuntu derivatives that should look like you want it to be.
To give an analogy: Changing the distribution just because you don't like the default DE is like changing your computer because you don't like your monitor.

If you feel the need to do that just do it. Nobody will blame you for it, this is open source. But it is rather overkill to rewrite a whole desktop environment (in 2008 the Gnome 2 environment contained about 13 million lines of code) just because you don't like the look of it on one distro. Would be easier to just create a theme that fits to your likings.

Who "they"?

The beauty of open source is if you don't like it and can't find what you want you can modify it any way you want. This is called a "fork" and many people have forked many projects either because they thought they could do it better or because the original product was abandoned or because they didn't like the politics of the existing product.
Some examples:
Many people left RedHat when it got rid of the non-commercial and that ultimately resulted in them helping with setup of Fedora as a non-commercial fork of original RedHat - this has been so successful that Fedora is used as a test bed for what ends up in the commercial RHEL.
CentOS, Scientific Linux and OEL are all derived from RHEL.
Folks have made forks of MySQL because it is now part of Oracle's evil empire.
Libreoffice is a fork of OpenOffice for similar reasons.
Iceweasel was created as a fork of Firefox because they didn't like Firefox' licensing.
Heck even Ubuntu is a fork of Debian. There are forks of Ubuntu to other specialty distros.
And has been stated here many times you don't have to use ANY ubuntu distribution or fork thereof - there are dozens of distros available already to choose from. If you don't want to go to Debian which is upstream from Ubuntu you could go to another of its downstream derivations or a distro that has no relationship to Debian at all (except that they are all based on Linux kernels and GNU software).