Will I be able to use old fashion interface in Gnome 3?

Question

If i wish to use old-style interface (like Gnome 2 with global-menu and awn) in Gnome 3, will it be much of customizing and pain, or is just possible with a few clicks?

Answer 1

From the Arch Wiki on Gnome (where Gnome 3 is now in the main repos):

GNOME3 comes with two interfaces, gnome-shell (the new, standard layout) and fallback mode. gnome-session will automatically detect if your computer is capable of running gnome-shell and will start fallback mode if not.

Fallback mode is very similar to the GNOME 2.x layout (while using gnome-panel and metacity, instead of gnome-shell and Mutter).

If you are on fallback mode you can still change the window manager with your preferred one.

You can enable fallback mode while having gnome-shell installed by opening gnome-control-center. Go to System Info > Graphics and change "Forced Fallback Mode" to ON.

Or, open a terminal and enter:

$ GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session session-name gnome-fallback

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME