try Mandriva, it has the great advantage of using KDE instead of gnome. KDE is the king of all desktops, with easy settings you can set it up to be exactly how you want a desktop to be. it has endless options that are easy to choose. The desktop itself is far more intuitive and rich than GNOME. In addition Mandriva is very easy to install, it has good hardware support and it has easy configuration options and setting. Mandriva has a huge selections of easy to install packages, programs, features and support for various important things like video codecs. Additionally it has a very good configuration for security, MSEC where you can do all the basic setups for security via a menu with selections, anything from allowing or blocking ping to blocking bypassing of root password via boot manager.

i have tried tons of distroes, there are many good ones, Slackware is great for the "do everything yourself" person who wants to have compete freedom to do anything, Ubuntu/Kubuntu is great for those people who want everything as easy and simple as possible. Fedora is good for eye candy, fanziness and a solid base system(but very difficult to configure as you want), Debian is just great. Mandriva has all of these things, but not as difficult to change as Fedora, but not as easy as Slackware.

Generally, the more fancy and easy to use the system is the more difficult it becomes to make it like you want it.

Since you've already tried Ubuntu I would recommend trying some flavor of enterprise Linux. The easiest way to do so would be to put a live distribution onto a flash drive or a cd/dvd. It will run more slowly than if it were installed to a hard drive, but it will be far easier to set up and if you dislike it there is nothing to uninstall. Data persistence might be a problem (files and changes made will be lost upon reboot) depending on how you set it up but, again, it is so very easy .

Try Fedora... Gtk-3 works so much better out of the box than on Ubuntu! I swear by Fedora.