| Stable release | 3.3.2
/ March 18, 2014[1] |
|---|---|
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Linux |
| Platform | |
| Type | Graphical shell |
| License | GPLv3 |
| Website | glx-dock |
Glx-Dock or Cairo-Dock is a graphical shell that features docks, panels, desklets, and a full keyboard control with an abundance of applets and themes available.
Cairo-Dock supports a couple of protocols and standards endorsed by freedesktop.org and can be employed as stand-alone alternative to or together with Unity, GNOME Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, LXDE-panel.
Cairo-Dock shares many libraries like e.g. GTK+ or ATK with GNOME. As the name suggests, Cairo-Dock depends on Cairo.
Cairo-Dock has a family-likeness with OS X dock, but with more options. It uses cairo to render nice graphics, and Glitz to use hardware acceleration. It's fully configurable and can be a taskbar too. You can easily plug applets into it. Most actions can be done from keyboard.
Cairo-Dock is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.
In June 2014, the developers announced the release of a Wayland-port.[2] With this occasion, the developers also expressed a couple of technical criticism about the Wayland protocol, and Wayland compositors in their current version.
Wayland critique edit
Based on the lessons learned while porting Glx-Dock to Wayland, one Glx-Dock developer expressed some concrete criticism of Wayland and Weston over Mir. The latter is supposed to be better suited for 3rd party developers due to their adoption of BAMF[3] (after dropping WnckSync.[4]
It has been criticized, that only the Wayland compositor is able to access the list of surfaces (i.e. windows), which makes to harder to implement a taskbar, and that was impossible to have global shortkeys.
Adoption edit
References edit
- ^ "A new bug-fix version has been released for the 3.3 series! (v 3.3.2)". 2014-03-18.
- ^ "Glx-Dock/Cairo-Dock Has Been Ported To Wayland". 2014-06-21.
- ^ https://launchpad.net/bamf BAMF
- ^ https://launchpad.net/wncksync WnckSync).