Ubuntu is for me the secondary operating system which I often use for one work or the other including blogging. As many of you may know, I am too impatient to try new versions as and when they come and hence I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 from Ubuntu 11.04 as soon as it came out.

The worst thing in Ubuntu for me is the Unity interface. I don’t like it at all and unless I am able to get rid of it, its very difficult for me to work on it. You need to do whole lot of work to even start to a point of starting a application which is too time consuming. Often its very difficult to find a application if you don’t know the exact name of the App. There is no simple way to even disable the auto hide option of Unity toolbar.

Ubuntu 11.04 provided a simple way to bypass Unity interface by just switching to Gnome classic desktop by selecting it from the drop-down options of the Login screen. But with Ubuntu 11.10, that option is gone. You can not select Ubuntu classic desktop option from the login screen now. In this post we will talk about how to disable Unity interface in Ubuntu and get the old classic Gnome desktop using few commands in the terminal window.

Just open the terminal in Ubuntu. You can search “terminal”. In the terminal window, type the following command to install Gnome shell.

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

It will ask you for the root password to proceed.  Keep in mind, you need to have a working internet connection to finish this install.

After install is finished, just reboot your system. Now after the reboot, you need to select Gnome during the login to get your old Gnome desktop instead of Unity.

After you login using this option, you will find the old Ubuntu Desktop and no Unity.

Are you using Ubuntu with Unity Interface? Like it or hate it? Would love to hear some opinion here.