Best dock for kde

[N00b-un-2]

I've been a gnome Ubuntu user since 7.10 and I was perfectly happy with it for several years. And then with the upcoming release of 11.10 officially retiring gnome2 replacing it with gnome shell and unity (both of which I absolutely hate) I finally jumped ship to KDE. That being said I have always set my desktop up like OSX (global menu bar on top and dock at the bottom). Both Unity and Gnome Shell have removed the ability to customize the way I want to so it was simply time to move on.

I feel like I never gave KDE a fair shake since its disastrous initial release but I'm quite pleased to find that it's improved greatly since then back in the 8.04 days. My biggest issue now is what dock will work best with KDE?

I've tried Cairo-dock but it is slow and buggy and like virtually every other dock, uses GTK+.
I've tried Docky which works well, but like Cairo which also uses GTK+ and tends to disregard my icon theme, favoring the default gnome icons which are hideous.
I thought about installing Avant Window Navigator (my dock of choice on Gnome for the past several years) but when I went to 'sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator' I saw that it basically has to install the whole gnome desktop as a dependency. No thank you...
I tried Fancy Tasks but the program is broken (despite being available in the repos...) and crashes plasma every time I try to use it.
I'm currently using the Daisy Plasmoid which looks nice and is completely native to KDE, but it is not very configurable and is notably missing the intellihide feature and despite having a configuration option to support drag and drop launchers, it does not work as advertised. In essence, it behaves like a simplified version of the OSX dock.
Are there any dock programs that are native to KDE the rival Docky or AWN in terms of functionality?

[raja.genupula]

Hey i hope you like them

http://www.internetling.com/2008/03/...linux-distros/

[N00b-un-2]

Thanks for the input, but I've come across that page already. Ksmoothdock and Kiba dock are both LOOOOONG since defunct. Cairo dock is glitchy at best with KDE and doesn't play nice with the KDE icons (prefers gnome icons since it --is-- a gtk app). Engage dock is completely incompatible with KDE. Sim Dock is terrible, but sticks around because it's the only one that truly doesn't require compositing. In fact, composite effects tend to make sim dock glitchy. And to reiterate, Avant Window Navigator relies on far too much of the Gnome desktop which I'm trying to get away from entirely.

In the end, the only dock specifically for KDE that actually works is Daisy Plasmoid but it's functionality lags far behind all other docks; no autohide, no drag and drop, no configurable effects, etc.

Avant is by far my favorite dock but it's a GTK app and I don't want any of those on my system. Docky works the best (least worst?) out of all the docks I've tried on KDE so until Daisy improves, I'll be sticking with it.

[Frogs Hair]

This is the only dock for KDE that I found that you haven't written about .http://kooldock.sourceforge.net/

[N00b-un-2]

eh.... I just got over it. Installed AWN. Then subsequently had to uninstall gnome (and Unity, thank you for that Canonical :@ ) Works great now though. Having to install gconf-editor so that I could disable gnome and then uninstall it was fun...

[sumski]

Have you tried fancy tasks?

[N00b-un-2]

fancy task seg faults on me. I've installed it using apt and I've built from source with the same result

[N00b-un-2]

Update! Using IconTasks with a non expanded panel at the bottom. Not quite as configurable as the Gnome docks are, but it is a effective KDE specific solution. It would be nice it the maintainer would add multiple modes like 3d background. The plasmoid works either standalone or as an applet within the panel. I built a deb from source to make installation simple for others. Took me days to figure out all the dependencies.

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...c836d93021cd95

[N00b-un-2]

Update! Using IconTasks with a non expanded panel at the bottom. Not quite as configurable as the Gnome docks are, but it is a effective KDE specific solution. It would be nice it the maintainer would add multiple modes like 3d background. The plasmoid works either standalone or as an applet within the panel. I built a deb from source to make installation simple for others. Took me days to figure out all the dependencies.

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...c836d93021cd95

[UnsolvedCypher]

Perhaps you want to try XFCE as a desktop environment? It is very similar to GNOME 2.X . Also, you can still use Gnome 2 even though it's "retired".