Not sure about the menu, but using Mate (which is GNOME2+ effectively), by default the menu was a weird menu in the style of Windows 11 where you had to type to

Not sure about the menu, but using Mate (which is GNOME2+ effectively), by default the menu was a weird menu in the style of Windows 11 where you had to type to find anything. But you could replace the menu with a different menu button from the applets list to get the traditional menu back / other styles. I wonder if it's the same for Gnome 4?