The Dock Wars :o

[Twitch6000]

This is just a simple topic to see which is the favorite dock amongst the community.

I will put all the docks I know of and a other option for anything I may have not heard of.

So now people as michael buffer would say..oh wait lets let him say it ;),http://youtube.com/watch?v=ALDGY8EFy-U&feature=related

Edit: Dang it I messed up on the poll name can someone rename it your favorite dock?

Edit2:
Avant video-http://youtube.com/watch?v=lHt5wSFsBjM
Kiba-Dock-http://youtube.com/watch?v=UcrBW2nUJnk
Cairo-Dock-http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tv4yrZT8-Dk&feature=related
Slim Dock Pic-http://images.howtoforge.com/images/mac4lin/Mac4Lin%20Documentation_html_m372bfd63.jpg

give me time for the others.

[SunnyRabbiera]

kooldock, as it needs no compositing and works fairly well

[zmjjmz]

I love Engage, but can I point out wbar?

[eragon100]

Cairo-dock. It's looks good, is updated regularly, and has lots of themes and effects :)

[cardinals_fan]

I don't like docks, but if I HAD to pick one, it'd be wbar.

[rune0077]

AWN looks the best, but Cairo is much much much more stable, and much faster too.

[Incense]

Engage. Love'd it when I was using DreamLinux.

[madjr]

This is just a simple topic to see which is the favorite dock amongst the community.

I will put all the docks I know of and a other option for anything I may have not heard of.

So now people as michael buffer would say..oh wait lets let him say it ;),http://youtube.com/watch?v=ALDGY8EFy-U&feature=related

Edit: Dang it I messed up on the poll name can someone rename it your favorite dock?

can you get some pics up of all of them

i only know AWN but i can't decide my mind on voting as i haven't seen the other contenders

[toupeiro]

can you get some pics up of all of them

i only know AWN but i can't decide my mind on voting as i haven't seen the other contenders

Seconded. :) I've only ever used and seen AWN. I really like AWN with Curve, but I admit it is buggy. I'd be interested in seeing some of the others via screenshots.

[scouser73]

I like AWN, I've not tried any of ther other docks mentionedm but will be giving them a go at some point.

[SomeGuyDude]

Cairo feels the smoothest, Kiba is probably the fanciest, I don't really consider Enlightenment's to be of the same ilk, but AWN is the only usable day-to-day dock that can COMPLETELY replace panels.

No exaggeration. Thanks to AWN, I have no panels on my desktop, and never have a need for them aside from the occasional notification in the tray. Toss on your menu, quit/logon, trash, terminal, and a few launchers... boom. I have yet to find appropriate applets for any of the others.

[vexorian]

I use gnome's taskbar, plus a hacked version of dynamicworkspaces (about the first time I use free software's capability of being edited to my advantage) that keeps a minimum 4 virtual desktops and keeps adding them as necessary (Ensures that there always is an empty one :)

I also added a custom launcher that runs a script to toggle between the taskbar's option for showing apps for all the desktops, it is nice that you can change a lot of gnome options through the command line...

[smoker]

fav is wbar when i can get it configured ok, and with a decent set of icons.

[Twitch6000]

Ok to all requests of pics I will instead posts videos with these docks :p.

[Twitch6000]

*bump*

[bufsabre666]

cairo dock is alright but dont take my word for it, i hate docks

[SomeGuyDude]

Cairo dock's preferences menu is TERRIBLE. With AWN, you open up the preferences, go into "launchers", and you can knock out everything you don't want. On Cairo, you have to right click on each one and select "remove", which takes way more time.

Not only that, but AWN is the only one that, if I recall correctly, uses your GTK icons theme. Cairo just used whatever the hell it wants. I really like my icons (black and white 2 style), and having all these colorful POS's on my dock drives me nuts.

[Depressed Man]

Cairo dock's preferences menu is TERRIBLE. With AWN, you open up the preferences, go into "launchers", and you can knock out everything you don't want. On Cairo, you have to right click on each one and select "remove", which takes way more time.

Not only that, but AWN is the only one that, if I recall correctly, uses your GTK icons theme. Cairo just used whatever the hell it wants. I really like my icons (black and white 2 style), and having all these colorful POS's on my dock drives me nuts.

I agree with you on the points. Though sometimes Cairo dock's useful when dealing with stubborn icons (like Open Office). I've tried replacing the icon when Avant is up, yet when I open a new openoffice window it still uses that ugly icon. :(

[SomeGuyDude]

I agree with you on the points. Though sometimes Cairo dock's useful when dealing with stubborn icons (like Open Office). I've tried replacing the icon when Avant is up, yet when I open a new openoffice window it still uses that ugly icon. :(

You have to set it separately with AWN. Kind of annoying, but a one-time fix. Open a document, set the icon. Open a black document, set the icon. You should be good then.

[qazwsx]

Panels for me. Kicker offers more features (not so much eye candy) and can be used as dock.

[smartboyathome]

my fav (not exactly a dock) is wbar. Other than that, I hate docks.

[sub2007]

AWN for me. Admittedly I haven't tried them all = I've tried AWN, Engage, Kiba and Cairo and AWN is far and away my favourite. I've used it for a while using the unstable version and I've seen it stabilize more over the releases. Some releases were buggy as hell, some just randomly crashed and some would crash if you hovered over an icon for too long (or hovered over a few dock icons). But the latest unstable version (and the last few I think) for me is rock solid, I can't seem to do anything to crash it!

[bluebyt]

cairo-dock is the best!

You can change everything (background, indicator....), there is a lot of plugin to choose and it is updated often!

Here a screenshot of cairo-dock:
http://pix.nofrag.com/e/4/e/16bf9aa16c5f88058b59a42d368b1t.jpg (http://pix.nofrag.com/e/4/e/16bf9aa16c5f88058b59a42d368b1.html)

[Onyros]

I'm gonna cast a vote for the missing option that's been mentioned more often, too: wbar :)

[Shiva88]

bluebyt- those are some incredible looking desktops you've got posted on your blog. Any chance you'd be willing to writeup some more details on how you acheived those looks? Ie., which icon sets, wallpapers, etc?

I know it's unimaginative, but I lack much artistic creativity, and would much prefer to just borrow other people's great ideas! :)

[bluebyt]

bluebyt- those are some incredible looking desktops you've got posted on your blog. Any chance you'd be willing to writeup some more details on how you acheived those looks? Ie., which icon sets, wallpapers, etc?

I know it's unimaginative, but I lack much artistic creativity, and would much prefer to just borrow other people's great ideas! :)

send me a PM with more detail of what you looking for.
bluebyt

[init1]

Meh I don't use docks.

[damis648]

Well I use awn, but curved. Its pretty weird and unique.

[kef_kf]

Meh I don't use docks.

ill use awn when it works with focus follows mouse. until then only the upper panel with shift switcher for me.

[moonbeam]

ill use awn when it works with focus follows mouse. until then only the upper panel with shift switcher for me.

There's some work on that going on now.

http://awn.planetblur.org/index.php?shard=forum&action=g_reply&ID=1828&page=1&isLive=true

awnterm, system monitor, main-menu, places and any python applets that use AWNLib should work with focus follows mouse if the key in question is set to false. I think :-)

[kef_kf]

awnterm, system monitor, main-menu, places and any python applets that use AWNLib should work with focus follows mouse if the key in question is set to false. I think :-)

i feel like i should do something to enable it but i cant figure out what. can you point me in the right direction please?

[vishzilla]

I prefer the panels over docks :P

[Twitch6000]

Well I reinstalled kiba-dock for hardy and I am liking it :).
I am just wondering how the heck to get those extra effects like in the video I put on the front page.

[moonbeam]

i feel like i should do something to enable it but i cant figure out what. can you point me in the right direction please?

Assuming you're using either the awn-testing ppa or reacocard's ppa: http://wiki.awn-project.org/DistributionGuides#Testing_Package_Archive

It's not an option in awn-manager yet so you need to start:

gconf-editor

And navigate to

/apps/avant-window-navigator/applets/shared/

In that folder there should be a boolean key called

dialog_focus_loss_behavior

It defaults to True (checked). Uncheck it and that's about it.

[ppmt]

Cairo-dock for me.

I haven't used any of the other but don't any reason to do it

Cairo-dock has all you need in a dock. You can get rid of all our gnome panel
and completely rely on Cairo-dock.

[fabounet]

definitely Cairo-Dock !
why ?
because it's the prettiest, is light and move smothly, and is 200% configurable.
because it has a lot of usefull applets that all can be detached from the dock to become desktop's widgets.
because you can place it on the top/left/right side of your creen
because it has 8 different renderings (amongst them is the awn's curve ;-) )
because it can use hardware acceleration (if you're lucky with your card ^_^ )
and the greatest reason : because it has a cute Tux wandering into in the dock :-D

oh course this is a totally _not_ objective point of view :-)

by the way, you can (of course) tell it to use a set of icons instead of its theme's ones, just remove the theme's path and add the icons set's path in the conf panel.

[neymac]

I used awn before I try cairo-dock. AWN is good, but cairo-dock is better. I like to use the weather applet, and the awn's one fill my /tmp directory with a large amount of images *.jpg of weather maps, the awn as well increases the time to load Gnome, this doesn't happen with cairo-dock.
The reason of the popularity of awn is that it's packets are in Ubuntu's repositories by default, what doesn't happen with cairo-dock.
The forum of cairo-dock is in French while awn's is in English, and there are a lot of people who doesn't read French.
Now I use cairo-dock SVN version, that works very well, and I see the great work they are doing there, improving every day the plugins (applets).
It would be nice if someone post how to add cairo-dock repositories for Ubuntu (by default would be great).

[_sAm_]

Witch one of these docks need less pc power? I tried AWN but it increased the boot time so much so I removed it(but it was very nice when it was up and running).

[neymac]

Witch one of these docks need less pc power? I tried AWN but it increased the boot time so much so I removed it(but it was very nice when it was up and running).

On my computer cairo-dock uses less CPU % than AWN.
I liked to use the MacSlow's Cairo Clock when I used AWN, and I noticed that MacSlow's Cairo Clock uses more CPU % than cairo-dock.
When I started to use cairo-dock with the clock plugin (that is based on MacSlow's Cairo Clock) I have less CPU % used by cairo-dock than the MacSlowCairoClock used and I got my nice Clock on the desktop.
I replaced the MacSlow Cairo Clock by the clock plugin of cairo-dock.

[neymac]

These two attached files show the cairo-dock clock and dustbin plugins that appear at my Destop when I start cairo-dock.And the cairo-dock bar.

[Twitch6000]

Witch one of these docks need less pc power? I tried AWN but it increased the boot time so much so I removed it(but it was very nice when it was up and running).

Slimdock uses the least cpu of all of them and still has just what you need.

[Samueltehg33k]

the only dock i would ever use is the one on OSX i'd rather use a taskbar for ubuntu....sorry

[aaaantoine]

I've tried AWN, Cairo Dock, and Gimmee. Out of those three, AWN is the easiest to set up, and in my opinion also the most stable.

However, I'm currently just using the Gnome Panel.

[paradoxxx_zero]

cairo-dock of course ! What else ?

http://paradoxxx.zero.free.fr/images/cairo-dock-slide-curve-thb.png (http://paradoxxx.zero.free.fr/images/cairo-dock-slide-curve.png)

[rhinopierroce]

cairo-dock, simply the best

[gameryoshi600]

awn of course

[neymac]

Attached the reduced screenshot of Hardy with cairo-dock weather, clock and dustbin applets (plugins) at the Desktop.
And minimized the compiz and switcher applets (plugins) at the bar.

[neymac]

Excuse me but there is a little mistake, it is not "CarioDock" as written above at the pool, the right name is Cairo-Dock.
Maybe for this reason several votes could be missed (or not)...
Another sample of my desktop with cairo-dock:
http://pix.nofrag.com/4/a/a/83dec735119f55adb34499478133ctt.jpg (http://pix.nofrag.com/4/a/a/83dec735119f55adb34499478133c.html)

[zarth]

For me, ... cairo-dock, what else ?

[angry_johnnie]

I liked older versions of Kiba-dock, when it didn't have to sit on that black table thing. :p
It's unstable, and silly, and it breaks... but it's so much fun. :-)
Of course, the fun wears out in a few days, and then it's dockless again...