Make Gnome look (more) like Unity
Unity die-hards [where?!-Ed] who are concerned about the shift to Gnome in the next Ubuntu release shouldn’t worry. For one thing, Unity 7 will remain available in the repos. Meanwhile, the nascent Unity 8 has been adopted by the community and will evolve accordingly.
However, having a Gnome desktop that vaguely resembles one’s former home might provide a pain-free transition to this brave new desktop world. We’ve already mentioned the popular Dash-to-Dock extension, which provides the dock that new Gnome converts will likely miss. This can be tweaked, either from Gnome TweakTool or the extensions website, to make things more Unity-like. It can adopt the characteristic placement on the left hand side of the desktop. Dash-to-dock can include the Applications menu from the activities overview, and it can be placed at the top, so that it works like a poor man’s HUD.
The auto-hide settings can be tuned to your taste, too. Setting it to Panel mode will extend the dock to the length/width of the screen, just like the Unity panel. The left-handed window controls in Unity are controversial, but can be recreated in Gnome by installing dconf-editor , navigating to the org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences key and changing the value of button-layout to close,minimize,maximize: (notice the colon). Ubuntu’s Ambiance GTK theme is in the process of being tweaked for Gnome, so this can add yet more Unity styling to your Gnome. For those wanting an even more Unity-esque desktop, there’s the b00merang theme for
Gnome Shell ( https://github.com/B00merang
Project/unity7). This works in tandem with everything else mentioned here, and the Ubuntu icon theme, to create the imitation pictured below.