ayo what now?

i use docks ever since i started with linux. i used plank with cinnamon, latte-dock with plasma, the xfce4-panel-but-dock-like-thingy with xfce4. if you can count the glassy sidebar in unity, that one too. but somewhere along the way, i stopped using it. until today.

this is my current desktop. i don’t like the windows-esque icons-on-taskbar thing, i use the “pager” plasmoid widget instead. (the one on the bottom panel, extreme left.) it’s handy, but i can’t launch applications with it. and i don’t use an application launcher (start menu equivalent) or an application dashboard. idk, a separate dock makes sense to me.

and on the left, that’s my dock. that’s where i have kept my dock, on the left. and it’s a regular plasma panel. but how the hell did i get here?

plank #

plank is really good, and it has recently been forked . but it doesn’t work on wayland. (i’m no wayland shill, i just happen to use what endeavourOS shipped with.)

latte-dock #

latte-dock was the best. but it hasn’t been ported to Qt6. and the last time i checked, it didn’t work on plasma 6.

the regular plasma panel #

what i did was:

• go to edit mode
• create a new empty panel
• change its position to the left
• only add the “icons-only task manager” widget

well, i added the “panel colorizer” plugin too to get that border. it has a lot of options, but i just sticked to some preset. and it works well!