I tried installing gnome 3 from the ppa, but it broke Unity and I had to reinstall Natty from scratch.
Does anyone know if there is a way to install Gnome 3 without breaking Unity?
Gnome 3 – Install Without Breaking Unity
gnomeunity
Related Solutions
You can try running sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-standard, or you can just click this button:
Or you can download this .deb which contains the theme also link
No is the simple answer - Unity in 11.10 utilises much of the Compiz rewritten code in 0.9.6. Indeed, a large majority of Unity consists of a Compiz specific plugin for v0.9.6. You will need to rewrite this to use Compiz 0.8.6.
It also has major dependencies upon the GTK+3 library set.
Best Answer
There is currently no easy way to do this, GNOME 3 requires a major transition to the GTK+ stack (from 2 to 3) that has not been done in Ubuntu yet.
This is a goal for 11.10, but currently I'm afraid trying GNOME3 on Ubuntu is more of a one-way upgrade.