I made my Cinnamon Desktop look like the Gnome desktop with a Dock.

Main Panel on top, made it smaller, put the clock in the middle, added an extra „power off“ applet in the top right corner and added a dock (Plank) on the lower edge, plus replaced the icons with a more appealing set - couldn‘t be happier.

Edit: I have to add, I started with Mint a month ago, then tried out CachyOS (Arch based) and Fedora KDE and Fedora Gnome, but nothing came close in stabilty and useability to Mint. If you don‘t have the newest hardware, Mint completely delivers. Might be a bit different with the latest GPU or other components, because most of the drivers are implemented in the Kernel of the distribution. And Mint is on a bit older Kernel, so not quite up to date with the latest and newest hardware.

As a rule of thumb, if your hardware is older than about 2 years, Mint should work just fine. If it‘s newer, a more up to date distro like Fedora (Nobara, Bazzite) or Arch (EndevourOS, CachyOS, Manjaro) might be better.

I made my Cinnamon Desktop look like the Gnome desktop with a Dock.

Main Panel on top, made it smaller, put the clock in the middle, added an extra „power off“ applet in the top right corner and added a dock (Plank) on the lower edge, plus replaced the icons with a more appealing set - couldn‘t be happier.