Desktop needs to be user friendly

The software my company produces is terminal based. Our customer base is largely elderly. We switched from a SCO Unix to Red Hat environment. terminal to X. They are used to using the main server as a workstation and not just as a server.

Some customers have terminal only based devices (NetTerminal) and may not even have used a window-driven interface before. Some have Microsoft Windows workstations and use a telnet client to access the software on the Red Hat server.

I have had complaints from customers that Gnome is too difficult to use and are very upset with us (Gnome HID studies eat your heart out). A few examples:

1. Top and bottom bars are confusing.
2. Workspaces are confusing. We tell them to not use them but they play with their system anyway and get stuck in a different workspace and become upset.
3. "System is slow" for a few customers. They claim there are multi-second delays on the server head, while remote workstations are not affected. The server load is less than 0.05 and CPU is 99% idle. It may be the X driver on servers is redrawing too slowly for these customers.

I realize we can change the look of Gnome by manually tweaking, but doing this for each customer is time consuming. Yes, we could copy a "fixed" /home and give it to each customer, but each customer might have different complaints. A compromise needs to be found.

Moving to Gnome 3 in RHEL7 as it stands today would be a nightmare. Our customers would probably threaten to leave us.