I've never used Gnome as a daily driver for my desktop. I didn't like it when I tried it. And I've always heard it's not the most customizable desktop. So may I suggest trying KDE? It's completely customizable. You can delete the task bar and replace it with others like Cairo (looks like mac taskbar) or none at all and use desktop widgets instead. But whatever you choose, you should backup your home directory first. If something goes wrong you don't need to lose your entire profile, just do a restore.