It's a light fork of Dash to Dock extension for GNOME Shell

Aug 18, 2017 19:52 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu contributor and Open Source developer Didier Roche had the pleasure of revealing today the Ubuntu Dock, Canonical's modification of the Dash to Dock extension for the GNOME desktop environment of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 operating system.

We gave you a first glimpse of the Ubuntu Dock the other day, and we were wondering if Canonical will place the dock on the left side of the screen or at the bottom. Well, today's revealing confirms that it's on the left, similar to the location of the Unity Launcher in current stable Ubuntu Linux releases.

"Today is the day. After upgrading (and all things migrating), our new Ubuntu Dock should be installed by default and activated in your Ubuntu artful session. Note that of course, this is part of the GNOME Shell ubuntu mode and not enabled in the GNOME vanilla session," said Didier Roche in his latest blog post.

Ubuntu Dock's settings to be exposed via GNOME Control Center

For now, Ubuntu Dock piggybacks on Dash to Dock's settings, which means that even if Canonical did a nice paint job on it, you'll be able to modify everything, including its position, size, color, transparency, behavior, etc. But there are a few reasons why Canonical decided to make their own fork.

For example, the dock needs to be enabled by default on the live medium and after installing Ubuntu 17.10, and for that a native package must exist in the repos, not an extension. Also, Canonical wanted to offer users a unique desktop look and feel, and upgrading Dash to Dock would have broken its initial design.

As Didier Roche mentioned in his blog, users should know that the Ubuntu Dock is, in fact, a customized version of Dash to Dock that ships with different default settings. And, as expected, the Ubuntu Dock will always be visible by default, though you can choose to disable it and install another dock.

Canonical's Ubuntu Dock doesn't ship with a settings button like Dash to Dock, but you can use that of Dash to Dock if it's installed on your Ubuntu 17.10 machine. Instead, users will be able to control a few aspects of the Ubuntu Dock via GNOME Control Center's Displays panel.

"You can change here the icon size in the launcher, the Hide mode (intellihide is available) and showing the dock in all monitors or your preferred one," said Didier Roche. "This impacts as well Dash to Dock if you installed it. Of course, this change is only visible in the Ubuntu session, not the GNOME vanilla one."

It should also be noted that Canonical decided to implement a functionality that will make it possible to migrate your existing Unity Launcher settings to Ubuntu Dock's when you want to upgrade your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 17.04 PCs to Ubuntu 17.10 this fall on October 19.

Ubuntu Dock (4 Images)

Ubuntu Dock on Ubuntu 17.10
Ubuntu Dock on GNOME ShellUbuntu Dock on Ubuntu 17.10 with GNOME
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