You can install Cinnamon (the window manager used by Linux Mint), and it's very good. It behaves "traditionally" (i.e. like Windows 7), and it's much prettier than XFCE.
I recently switched to Cinnamon and couldn't be happier.
I never really liked Unity, i used Gnome Shell and it was usable ok. But for my work nothing seems to beat the good old taskbar-based design.