Cairo-Dock 3.3 release! Author fabounet, Friday 11 October 2013 à 01:11 Note Comments 6 Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative or addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel and even LXDE-panel for a light and sexy interface (details and example here).

It features docks, panels, desklets, a full keyboard control, tons of applets, themes, and much more.





A mix of 4 actions when using the Default-Panel theme on a Cairo-Dock session





The Light-Grey theme on a Cairo-Dock session





Cairo-Dock with Compton when using LXDE environment ( details here



Here is a quick tour of the main changes in the 3.3 version, 6 months after the previous one:



General

The Applications Menu has been improved: it has now a search entry that allows you to rapidly look for programs from their name or their description. The results are cleanly integrated into the menu, making it a fast and efficient way to launch programs (or even commands).





The menu with the search entry on the top;

you type something and the results replace the previous menu



It also allows you to quickly launch a newly installed application.



The applet proposes you to launch the application you just installed



The dock now supports the StartupNotification protocol; it allows launchers to be animated until the application starts, and avoids an accidental double launch if you click twice on a launcher before its application starts.

A new third-party applet has been created: Notification History ; it keeps the history of notifications (from the system or from any applications that send notifications), so that you never miss any of them.



The applet keeps the history of notifications sent by your applications



The Dbus API (a way send commands to the dock, and control it from a terminal or another application) has been improved, and allows to act on any object (Icons, Modules, Docks, Desklets, etc) with only a few methods. This has been a huge work in parallel with rewriting the core to use Objects, making the code easier to maintain.



For a longer list of changes, see this topic



Environment support

We work hard to make Cairo-Dock run in any desktop environment.

The goal is to have a nice tool that can run along with the default Shell, or even replace it completely.

The Logout applet now supports Logind from Systemd , which is replacing Consolekit for managing the user session in more and more distributions.



The Logout menu is now working with Systemd



The dock can now use some abilities of the Cinnamon desktop (windows Exposé, desktops Exposé), as it already does with Compiz , Kwin and Gnome-Shell .





Windows of the same application can be displayed together by the dock, here on Cinnamon





How to install

Installation is very easy, simply follow the wiki, depending on your distribution: Wiki: installation

E.g. for Ubuntu users, you can simply copy/paste these 3 lines into a terminal: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/ppa

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins





What to expect in the future ?

With the recent decision from GTK to remove icons in menus for all GTK-based programs (even the ones not linked to Gnome at all), it's a good occasion for us to rewrite the way menus are drawn in Cairo-dock, and make them more consistent with other objects (dialogue bubbles, docks, etc).

Also, with Wayland and Mir's interfaces becoming more and more stable, we can start thinking of supporting these new technologies.

We could have some new applets and new theming features too.



Now, it's time to thank all 300.000 users of the 3.2 version; that's quite a big number, and we hope you'll enjoy this new version as well.



And as always, if you appreciate the project and want to encourage us, please feel free to contribute, report bugs, write some articles about Cairo-Dock or even donate



The Cairo-Dock team.





Tags :

dem666on1, Tuesday 15 October 2013 à 13:40 Hello. When on FreeBSD?

fabounet, Tuesday 15 October 2013 à 14:43 it's available on BSD from the 3.2 (but you may need to compile it from sources)

Guest, Friday 18 October 2013 à 06:25 I added cairodock ppa today and install it, but I still got v3.2. Is the ppa not updated yet?

matttbe, Friday 18 October 2013 à 09:32 Is the ppa not updated yet? Yes it is.



What's the output messages produced by these commands launched from a terminal? sudo apt-get update

apt-cache policy cairo-dock

Guest, Wednesday 07 May 2014 à 15:02 There is no button to download this app. Where is it? And is it free?

matttbe, Wednesday 07 May 2014 à 15:29 Cairo-Dock should be available in your GNU/Linux or BSD repositories. For more details about that: http://glx-dock.org/ww_page.php?p=By%20distributions&lang=en

