With the arrival of Gnome 3, Gnome 2 was discontinued in most major distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, Arch Linux etc. However, a few distros like Debian, Gentoo are still using the old desktop while Linux Mint maintained a separate repository called gnome2-frozen for older gnome builds. However, soon they will discontinue that as well.

As quoted from Linux Mint blog:

“This is our last goodbye to Gnome 2, a desktop we enjoyed working with since 2006 and which we can unfortunately no longer provide. Although there are still a few technologies which weren’t ported to newer desktops, we’re really proud of the work done by the MATE team and the results we’re getting with Cinnamon. Desktops like KDE and Xfce have also matured a lot and new solutions such as Shell and Unity provide additional alternatives to users.”

Users wishing to keep last Gnome 2 builds can download them from rsync://debian.linuxmint.com::gnome2-frozen as they are likely to be availiable for a couple of weeks. Better still, you can also move to Mate desktop which is similar to Gnome 2 or Cinnamon which provides a simpler interface of Gnome 3.