If you love gnome2 you'll be thrilled when you install the gentoo 'mate' overlay. It's like coming home for the holidays and putting on your old fuzzy slippers :)
I had to work around two minor problems before the whole package would build: 1) I had to remove the pulseaudio useflag for mate-setting-daemon: #grep mate /etc/portage/package.use mate-base/mate-settings-daemon -pulseaudio 2) The mate package doesn't know about our multi-slot python thing, so the configure script couldn't find <Python.h> This is an embarrassing hack, but you can remove it after installing mate: #cd /usr/include #ln -s python2.7 python [or python3.3 if that's what you use]. I'd suggest removing that symlink after mate is installed because gentoo doesn't do python that way and might get confused in the future. I use startx, so I just put 'exec mate-session' in my .xinitrc, and now I'm sooooo happy :) :) :)
