The Best Dock Application In The World? Probably…

With apologies to Carlsberg.

I upgraded to Ubuntu Lucid last month and already, again, my desktop is starting to look vastly different from previous incarnations. Up till recently I had been using Cairo Dock, which is a damn find dock, but whilst looking for something completely different I happened upon a blog post by Tech Drive-In which caused me to try out Docky.

Having installed it, I can testify to it’s ease of use and simplicity. What’s more is the simplicity doesn’t kill it. It’s very easy to add icons and widgets – docklets and helpers as well as configure size and theme. Admittedly the list of docklets are looking a little bare right now – hopefully that will change.

One thing it has that I’ve not seen in other docks is the ability to switch to panel mode – this stretches out the dock to the borders and causes it to behave like a rather stylish panel which I like a lot. This is great for people who like the idea of docks but find using them slightly more cumbersome.

It’s also less buggy and intrusive than some of the other dock applications I’ve used. Cairo is pretty good but sometimes it feels a little in the way, and the auto-hide feature can be a little too sensitive. Docky’s autohide in comparison is much more stable and non-intrusive – it can be set to dodge either active or all windows.

One thing that Docky lacks is the ability to customise how your icons react on hover and click. The only option right now is zoom, which also doesn’t work in panel mode. It’s not a bother for me because after a while of using a Mac-like dock you lose interest in how many times the icon flashes.

The other very, very slight niggle is the Docky settings icon which appears permanently and immovable on the left-hand side of the bar – I don’t see a way to remove it. It’s just a slight niggle, but in panel mode it takes the place of where the logical app menu would normally appear. Not a problem for me but maybe for Linux newbies.

Other than that, is it the best dock app in the world? Not sure, but it’s the best I’ve used so far, for it’s simplicity and non-intrusiveness. Download Docky from Launchpad or check your package manager – I installed it from Ubuntu Software Centre.