You can switch the repositories from Debian Stable to Debian Unstable. Don't let the term 'Unstable' scare you, it's unstable relative to Debian Stable. Ubuntu is actually built from Debian Unstable.
I think the best method is to install another distro as @freqlabs suggested, preferably one which follows upstream closer than Debian.
Have a look at MATE, for a classic, nice looking desktop experience without all the ugly crap that is Gnome3, KDE5 and Unity ^_^
Yeah I switched to the experimental one (same as unstable?) and it said no new updates for gnome-shell...
Really? Last time I heard about Emerald and tried it out (2007/2008) it was just a gimmicky thingy. Guess things change over the time.
If you think Cinnamon is ugly you don't cnow what you are talking about @Logan!
Simplicity is the ultimate elegance. I installed Cinnamon on OpenSUSE and the only thing I couldn't get to work was that of MDM (I used LightDM instead). Spotify works after converting the .deb to an .rpm granted I have a broken dependency as a consequence (I can't resolve it, but everything works as it should). Cinnamon is awesome especially with its tiling features. I finally found the ultimate desktop environment. The theme is HackStation (the darkest theme I could find that looked decent), and the icons are Flat Ghost (the best IMO as they're flat and white).
Yeah well Debian is quickly starting to annoy me. Followed the instructions for updating and ended up with a fucked gnome3, no right click, and no way to close windows. Had to create she'll scripts just to get a terminal open and kill processes.
Well currently installing Gentoo so if that isn't an indication of my unwillingness to power through gnome3, then idk what is.
those icons are nice as hell
I got tired of Debian myself because the update process was too tedious. I moved to Arch after awhile. Arch has a notorious reputation for being difficult to install, but if you can install Debian, you should have no problem installing Arch. You're just doing whatever the Debian installer would do manually. If Arch doesn't float your boat, there's always Fedora, which I prefer to OpenSUSE due to my dislike for YaST.
How do you change the top bar that the time is in?
I'm curious if @Logan installed Ubuntu Gnome or installed Ubuntu and then replaced Unity with Gnome. I'm planning on swapping from Linux Mint 17.1 to Gnome 3 on Ubuntu and need to decide which route to follow. I am also considering Antergos. The only thing is that I am so familiar with the Debian-based distro commands and such that it would take some time to adjust.
Why would it take time to adjust? Ubuntu is based on debian.
Going from Debian to Arch.....Antergos is Arch not Debian.
IMHO, you would be pretty okay, Linux is Linux, works the same way, all you will need to learn is a new package manager, how to use the AUR and updating incrementally and frequently.
I never ran Antergos, but I did, and still am doing to a lesser extent, a lot of Arch stuff.
When I first started I also moved from Debian to Arch, it was a lot of fun :D
@Logan Hey you should venture Into opensuse.. I find it to support gnome better.. Since Ubuntu main focus will always be unity unfortunately.. None the less gnome is beautiful.. Have you looked at plasma 5
plasma 5 is sexy but not on Opensuse. Support there is still kinda shitty.
I tried to go to gnome 3 on Linux Mint 17 and found that it would bork my install cause Mint locks you into specific versions of the packages. Like if you switch to GTK 3.14, all hell breaks loose. On my laptop, battery charging stopped working till I went back to the previous version of GTK.
