You might check out xfce. It’s gtk like Gnome but the development team doesn’t have their heads up their asses; pretty much every aspect of xfce can be customized. It should be a simple install from your package manager, whatever distribution you’re using. The downside of this, however, is it might take extensive tweaking to get it to look how you want as it’s a pretty bare bones UI by default. Personally I like it, but ymmv.
That’s the beautiful thing about the Linux world. If you don’t like some aspect there’s virtually always an alternative.