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> People use default Ubuntu with Unity?

Of course, I don't even change the background. "Canical crap" is mostly mythical or takes a single toggle to turn off.

I like very much ubuntu-gnome. They need some help http://ubuntugnome.org/

I tried it with, I think, 13.04 and you could see they need people testing it. For a raw Gnome distro Fedora is the better choice.

The people you know don't use stock Ubuntu. My mom and yours don't even know what a package manager is.

My parents use Xubuntu because it's the closest you can get to WindowsXP ;)

I would have suggested Linux Mint/any distro that you can drop Cinnamon DE onto. Cinnamon has more updates, almost as much customization as XFCE, and doesn't look as old as Win95.