No not the weed! you guys know what i mean. That thing that has similar functions to a taskbar or panel, or in some cases may be a panel, customized to work like a 'dock'. Docks are arguably very apple inspired. Some people love them, while others seem to hate them. I don't know if the current xfce does it, but xfce used to by default have one of there panels to work similar to a dock. So what do you think of docks. I personally own a mac book pro, i bought before experiencing Gnu/Linux; and since, has pretty much become my girlfriends computer which only gets used to watch dvds. I hate the dock in Osx, i transformed it to the old 2d version so it's more like a panel, but although slightly better, i find the dock a very annoying thing. On Gnu/Linux, i've run kde for the longest period of time and have recently switched to gnome/mate, and i wouldn't dream of using a dock. Obviously, there are many people that do like docks, so i wanted to know what other people like in reference to docks. 2d, 3d, none at all, gnome3 style? you get the picture.

I run cairo-dock (GL) on XFCE, with no panel, and cairo-clock on the desktop.

Quick launch items for the most common things i run, and the "Applications Menu" plugin, for stuff i dont use as often.

Xfce doesn't have a dock by default, but some distros add one.

For me, docks are like icons on the desktop: completely pointless. I launch all the common programs from the keyboard: super-a for accounts, super-d for the document viewer, etc.

I once tried using a dock (AWN specifically), and I didn't like it. It seemed really big and obtrusive with the large icons (even of applications that aren't running), and the idea of using the same icon both to launch an instance of a program and switch to an open window of it seems strange and confusing to me.

I would never use a panel, dock, taskbar, etc that doesn't auto-hide. None of the docks I've tried do.

The slit in Fluxbox, which is like a dock, has an auto-hide function. I run gkrellm in the Fluxbox slit with autohide on. I haven't found any other dockapps that attract me.