I came to the *nix scene of recently, and when I was involved, there was Gnome 2.4 and KDE 3.1.
The only time I've used anything other than a 2.6.x kernel is when I ran Slack 10.1--which uses 2.4.29 by default.
IIRC, the server that my school website and email is on uses DEC Unix...
Do you have shell access to it? If so, what's its uptime? Yeah, I'm nosy.