I’m running Gnome under Ubuntu and I’ve had this Dock on the bottom of the desktop. First it was Avant Window Navigator (AWN), then – after reading only positive things regarding it – I moved to Gnome Do – Docky (GDD). After the upgrade to 9.10 GDD became a bit unstable and it’s unstableness sort of had some impact on the whole system. I didn’t log any of this, but I decided that GDD had to go, or stay if there wasn’t any other alternative out there.
So I went out and found four Docks: AWN, Cairo-Dock, GDD and Docky. This is the roundup:
AWN:
This is actually a great dock. You can configure it quite well and it does what a dock should do. Tell which programs are running, and be a faster way to start new applications. On my system how ever, it was slow – and I am then only focusing on the way the dock hid it self. But other than that, AWN is a great dock application.
This is one dock that I do not like, and I never have. I did how ever want to give it another go. The things I don’t like about the Cairo-Dock is the way it presents itself. When it’s hidden, a blurred (your distro) logo is shown. The tooltips / hover labels are outlined. When you remove the outlines, it looks extremely bad. It did not work well with my feelings. So it was quickly removed.
I kind of like this dock. It’s part of the Gnome Do package. Gnome Do is an application where you can start applications or open documents – and probably other things as well – by typing the name of the application. With Gnome Do + Dock in I could’ve removed the top menu bar. GDD also has a few plugins so that you can remove the bottom bar if you want to.
After posting a tweet regarding my docking tests I was suggested to try out the Docky application. It is now running on my laptop. I kind of like it, but it has less features than the others. When I write features, I mean plugins. I haven’t explored it that much yet though, and it could be that there are more plugins for it now. One that I miss, which is in most of the other dock-applications, is the workspace-switcher. It could be that it is a way to show this, but I haven’t found it – yet.
Hey Trong,
I am actually hacking on porting the old workspace switcher from Docky 1 into Docky 2 as we speak. The old code was kind of… bad… so we are re-writing it to make it more reliable. Sorry this missing feature was such a loss, I hope the other things we have added will make up for it in the mean time! Expect the switcher by Sunday night.
Jason