What is Reddit's opinion of Plank?

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As pointed out by someone else, you could just try a different DE. No need to switch distros. You're gonna want a dock and maybe some way to get a global menu.

I'd recommend Plank since it looks good, it's light and stupid easy to configure. As for the appmenu, there's options for Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Mate. That's up to you to investigate. I personally have had good experiences with a setup like this (kinda) on XFCE.

Also, please use google/duckduckgo/insert-your-fave-search-engine-here for stuff like this. We've had many threads by the lines of "what distro should i use??" in the past weeks and it's getting old. In the end, that's a question that only you can answer.

• Wallpaper: http://alpha.wallhaven.cc/wallpaper/103929
• GTK: Numix
• Icons: Numix Circle
• Dock: Plank
• Other: XFCE with a transparent panel and compiz

• Distro: Linux Mint
• DE: XFCE
• Wallpaper: Stolen from another post here, included in album
• GTK: Arc OSX
• Icons: La Captaine mixed with Papirus
• Dock: Plank

> The biggest red flag I saw was that they were using docky in a gnome 3 environment. Why. Just why. If they had just incorporated dash to dock into the actual OS....then the whole system would actually be a bit lighter weight AND you would have the full page application menu like apple has. That way you are not split between using the dock and having to go tot he top bar to use slingshot.

I'm not sure if it was like that in the past (before Luna), but that's definetly not that way anymore for quite some time. The dock used by Pantheon (the elementary OS desktop) is Plank, which is extremely lightweight. Afaik more recent versions of Docky are based on Plank, but it's not the same.

Moreover, Pantheon is not GNOME3 / GNOME Shell. It's a DE built "from scratch" (using some GNOME libraries though) with its own Window Manager (Gala) and a custom LightDM Greeter (Pantheon Greeter), so it's not even using GDM or GNOME Shell. Therefore, you can't apply GNOME Shell extensions to Pantheon.

Just to clear up some misconceptions :) It's not possible to know everything about every piece of software floating around the Linux space of course!

It's a really young DE written and used by Evolve OS and I really love it. I'm a bit demanding / special regarding my desktop (both in terms of UX and design) and Budgie and Pantheon both suit me the most. But as Budgie is basically developed by one person, popularity and new developers would be amazing :)

It does not come by default with the dock though, that's plank.

Not exactly what you're after but I use XFCE with KWIN and Plank with Plank being a fairly close clone of OSX dock so I can get rid of having "button bars" for every open app.

• Wallpaper: I forget where I found this
• GTK: [Mint Y Dark]
• Icons: Masalla
• Dock: Plank
• Other: The distro is Linux mint and the music player is Spotify

Thanks, but I've tried it and find that it lives up (and down, as it were) to its word, viz.: 'Plank is meant to be the simplest dock on the planet. The goal is to provide just what a dock needs and absolutely nothing more.'

Still, apparently (and this text is from the same webpage): ' It is, however, a library which can be extended to create other dock programs with more advanced features' ..

Thank you muchly. And happy to answer, no need to apologize.

I did make the monitor stands. It was originally all one long shelf...I cut it into three segments today to make for better viewing angles.

The dock is Plank, it's like Docky but much simpler. You can install to Ubuntu from their PPA.

(Is this what you mean by tray?)For the tray I'm using Window List with App Grouping

Otherwise I'm using Plank

Sorry, it just occured to me that there'a n extension called Dash to Plank that you can use with the Plank Dock to integrate it into Gnome, and it seems to work rather well (I don't personally use it, but it's simple and highly thought of from what I've heard). You have to use X11 instead of Wayland because Plank isn't Wayland ready yet, but it might be an option for you.

• Cinnamon extension: Transparent panels
• Dock: Plank (not currently visible)
• Terminal: Tilix
• Background: this
• Cinnamon menu icon: Computer icon in Papirus icon theme
• On screen:
  • Brave
  • neofetch
  • Spotify arc-dark theme via spicetify
  • glava --desktop

Install dash to dock:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/

and or

plank (my favorite as it has an intelligent dock hiding feature that dodges maximized windows similar to a dock in OSX):

https://launchpad.net/plank

> https://launchpad.net/plank

Ah yes - a pretty guessable URL! :)

> Looks like the latest version was released back in 2017, over two years ago.

And bug reports and questions (there's some sort of ask-a-question feature on the launchpad page) are ignored.

I used to use Plank but - though this might owe not to Plank but to a bug in Mint or Cinnamon - it started popping up over full-screen windows (games, VirtualBox). And it wasn't well integrated into Cinnamon (my DE). Then I discovered that Cinnamon panels could be made to behave considerably like docks, so long as one hacked a Cinnamon theme to add some transparency. So now I do that, i.e. use a Cinnamon panel instead. It's not ideal but it's OK.

Docks are in a poor way on Linux at the moment: many are very old and unmaintained (which doesn't stop some ultra-low-effort websites from recommending them). Latte Dock looks good but it runs only on Plasma (a.k.a. 'KDE').

I guess you mean https://launchpad.net/plank

I don't see an OpenBSD package of plank, so you might need to download the source code of plank and build it yourself. It looks like a .tar.xz with a GNU configure script. It mentions vala (from pkg_add vala), but I don't know if it needs other packages.

One might try ./configure --prefix=$HOME/prefix then make install in a terminal. Some builds need extra configure arguments, like ./configure --prefix=$HOME/prefix CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib if they need to look in /usr/local for libraries. Some builds need gmake (from pkg_add gmake) instead of make. Some builds give errors and need changes to the source code to work in OpenBSD.

Wallpaper: Stock

Icons: Papirus

THemes: Adapta

Dock: Plank

WM: Xfwm4+Compton

Hey, no problem.

1. The dock isn't a panel, it's Plank with this theme. I think Plank is available from the default software sources without having to add any.
2. Thanks! They're the 'light' variant of Zafiro.

• Wallpaper: Stock xfce wallpaper
• GTK: X-Arc-White
• Icons: la-capitaine-icon-theme
• Dock: Plank

what I know! elementary use plank as dock and elementary team is not the maintainer of the plank repository. The people behind plank want a simple minimalist dock https://launchpad.net/plank. So they want to add a window-preview. Bug link here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/plank/+bug/1534609 And I don't know if the elementary team will fork the dock, because they have enough repos to maintain.

I like xfce mainly because it's simple and I can add mods to it to fit it to my need. It's also pretty lightweight so it's not in the way (cpu/ram/etc). One thing is that the xfce compositor sometimes acts up on some hardware so you might want to replace it with Compton. I also use a dock style add-on Plank if you like using that. KDE is nice, give you a choice of 3 style of desktop and is feature rich but I really like how the whisker menu in xfce behave (and I'm not a fan of the newer dashboard like menu like in gnome / unity).

Not to rain on your Linux parade as a fellow user, but there are plenty of programs on both Linux and Windows that offer this functionality: RocketDock for example, or Plank on Linux. They're both maintained.

• Wallpaper: ARTCast by kybel on deviantArt
• GTK: Default (no changes)
• Icons: Numix-Circle
• Conky: Default (no changes)
• Dock: Plank with default Pantheon theme