Floating Dock Is the Perfect Dock for the GNOME 40 Desktop

Floating Dock GNOME 40

If you miss the Dash to Dock extension on the GNOME 40 desktop environment, there’s a replacement you can use right now, called Floating Dock.

Floating Dock is not a new extension for the GNOME desktop, but it was recently updated by its creator to work on the latest GNOME 40 desktop environment, allowing you to have an always visible (or hidden) dock on your screen for launching apps.

As you may be aware, the GNOME 40 desktop environment comes with a major redesign of the Activities Overview that also moves the dock from left side of the screen to the bottom. For me, that makes navigating much easier, but I have to admit that I miss having an always-on dock.

While I can install a third-party dock like Plank from the repositories, the Floating Dock extension makes things much easier until a more advanced extension like Dash to Dock adds support for GNOME 40.

The fact of the matter is that Floating Dock is quite advanced, not only allowing you to launch your favorite apps, but also useful if you want to quickly switch between multiple workspaces and running apps using the mouse wheel.

But the best thing I like about Floating Dock is that you can place the dock virtually anywhere on your desktop. It doesn’t have predefined locations like left, right, bottom or top, you just drag the dotted blue icon anywhere you want, even on the middle of the screen (but why would you do that?).

On top of that, Floating Dock features a so-called “Vi mode” that can be enabled with the Ctrl+Alt+K keyboard shortcut if you want to launch apps via your keyboard. On top of that, right-clicking on the dotted blue icon gives you quick power controls like shutdown, logout, suspend, and lock screen.

The position of the dock, vertical or horizontal and left or right, can also be set by right-clicking on the dotted blue icon, which will remain visible on the screen at all times.

If you’re using the Mozilla Firefox web browser and have the GNOME Shell integration add-on installed, you can install the Floating Dock extension with a single mouse click from the GNOME Shell Extensions website.

One thing I forgot to mention is that GNOME’s dock won’t be replaced, so you will have to disable it with the Just Perfection extension. Also, from the extension’s settings, which you can alter in GNOME’s Extensions app, you can also adjust the size of the icons and choose which apps you want to have on the dock.

Last updated 3 years ago

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