I was in the same place as you but I broke my 16.04 and I was "forced" to upgrade. Now I use Pop_OS with dash panel and it does the job. I use it on the bottom

I was in the same place as you but I broke my 16.04 and I was "forced" to upgrade. Now I use Pop_OS with dash panel and it does the job. I use it on the bottom you can put it on the left side to imitate Unity. It's not the same but it's usable. Now I can't recommend linux to anyone, though. I'm not going to explain everyone that they're going to install some extensions that may crash after an update if they want to be able to, let's say, see a bar with all your opened applications, which you can't do in Gnome.