Ubuntu – GNOME Classic on Ubuntu 16.04

The Gnome Classic in 11.10 is Gnome Panel 3. It has been ported to GTK 3, so there's no reason not to support it. The question of development is mostly a question of popularity. Gnome Panel 2 have been very popular, but I'm not entirely sure that's because of the panels themselves, but because of the large number of available applets that is available for it. From a users perspective, these were quite nice, but from a developers perspective, the technology they were based on, are horribly outdated. So the question remains if anyone is going to actually port them to the new platform. If that happens, then I think Gnome Panel 3 can have a good future, but it requires quite a bit of effort and somebody has to do the work.

Because of this, I am a little bit sceptical that it will "take off". It seems more likely to me that people who want a similar environment to Gnome 2 will move on to Xfce, which already has a community and some momentum. I don't think Gnome referring to it as a fallback helps create enthusiasm to rebuild the Gnome 2 experience on Gnome 3.

But this is pure speculation. It's impossible to tell how this will unfold.

You want the mate desktop, it is designed to emulate the old gnome 2 desktop, you can use these commands to add it to your current 15.10 install

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/utopic-mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-core

Now log out and click the cog icon and choose mate

Alternitivly, there is an official mate based version of Ubuntu here