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cairo dock

Cairo Dock (or GLX Dock) is an animated application launcher (dock bar) for Linux that runs under GNOME, KDE or XFCE.

Cairo Dock 3.0 has been released recently, getting GTK3 support and many enhancements:
  • A new Twitter applet lets you tweet in one click
  • A new applet to inhibit the screensaver
  • Cairo Dock now uses GTK3
  • The Log out applet has been rewritten, now allowing you to switch users
  • Much better keyboard support: you can activate a launcher by pressing a shortkey and its number (like in Unity) and also, there are many new keyboard shortcuts
  • Enhanced taskbar
  • The Ubuntu Sound Menu has been integrated into the Sound-Control applet
  • Separators are transparent to click in 'Panel' mode
  • Text drawing (e.g. with Clock) has been improved
  • The new default theme with a panel is now included in the core package

Starting with version 2.4.0, Cairo Dock comes with its custom GNOME Session so you can use it as a stand-alone "shell". In version 3.0, a new session has been added which lets you use Cairo Dock with the Unity 2D top panel:

cairo dock Unity 2D


Here are a few more screenshots and a video with the latest Cairo Dock 3.0 in action:

cairo dock 3.0

cairo dock 3.0


(direct video link)




Install Cairo Dock 3.0


Ubuntu users can install the latest stable Cairo Dock 3.0 from its PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

There's also a Debian repository available for Cairo Dock - see THIS page.

For other Linux distributions, see the Cairo Dock installation page.


Thanks to Matthieu Baerts for the tip! Info via glx-dock.org