updated 2016-09-20
How to make Gnome 3 look and work almost like Gnome 2: Cinnamon
dnf install @cinnamon-desktop-environment
note:
MATE was built on gnome-2
CINNAMON was built on gnome-3
Once installed, on the next login, notice and click on the little gear icon next to the Sign In button. A drop-down list will show up providing the potion to use Cinnamon [ or Cinnamon (Software Rendering) ] for your GUI. Select on or the other and sign in.
Gnome 3 “fallback-mode” makes it look and function much more like Gnome 2, like it used to. (or, you can install Xfce. see below)
No desktop, no taskbar. Panned by critics, shunned by users, Linus calls it an “unholy mess.” Saying there are a number of things wrong with GNOME 3 is an understatement.
What makes all of this worse is the way GNOME dismisses the complaints, chalking it up to the fact that people don’t like change and that its users will acclimate. Fair enough. Except they won’t get used to it. GNOME isn’t the only free desktop on the block. The users will just leave. Even staunch supporters of the GTK (along with Linus himself) have left GNOME for the lower-end XFCE user interface. (light-weight and fast)
Activities >> Applications >> System settings >> System Info (below the bottom – you probably will have to scroll down to see it) >>
Graphics >> Forced Fallback Mode >> ON
GNOME 3 is not ready by any standard. It should have been released as a preview, and GNOME 2 should still be the flagship. If the GNOME Project was bent on breaking with every convention associated with traditional desktop interfaces, it should never have been released like this. Such a significant transformation has to be perfect or gradual, and this was neither.
By gutting GNOME of every power user-oriented feature (a functional desktop, virtual desktops, on-screen task management, applets, hibernation, and so on) it’s losing that intermediate-to-advanced crowd that’s responsible for bringing users on-board. The power user demographic isn’t going to recommend and support GNOME 3-based systems if they’ve already jumped ship.
Just how does GNOME intend to put the GNOME Shell into the hands of new users? By chasing away its current base with a brand new interface designed to be “easy,” and with no clear strategy for acquiring an easy-seeking audience, GNOME simultaneously shoots itself in the head and foot.
taken from “GNOME 3: Why It Failed”:
www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fedora-16-gnome-3-review,3155-27.html
an alternative:
Install Xfce
log in as root and run the command
yum install @xfce-desktop
and then
yum install @xfce-utils
Then, when you re-boot and open-up the login prompt, you will see right under the prompt, “session…”. click to open it up and select Xfce instead of Gnome