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GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions
A new GNOME extension called Simple-taskbar does a pretty good job of giving GNOME 50 a taskbar and start menu very much like the ones from Windows 11. It's so new that it's still not listed on the GNOME Extensions website – at the time of writing, it's still under review.
We built it and installed it, and it works. This single extension merges GNOME's built-in panel (across the top of the primary screen) and what it calls the "dash" – the icon bar down the left side – into a single taskbar, styled like Windows 11: icons centered, a Start menu with columns, a search box, and so on.
The handy feature here is to have all this in a single, integrated extension. There are already other extensions to do some of this, such as Dash to Panel, whose development is now sponsored by Zorin OS. It doesn't provide a Start menu replacement, though. For that, you need another extension, such as Arc Menu.