I rarely (if ever) see dock apps running on KDE desktops — but that could be about to change.

Latte Dock is a new desktop dock for KDE. Think Plank but for Plasma. It’s more than an app launcher too as it can act as a total Plasma panel replacement.

Reader Dart tipped me to Latte Dock (thanks!) and says the app “integrates with the Qt/Plasma desktop to the point that you can totally ditch default panel shipped with KDE. It also fully supports all plasma widgets.”

The Github page backs that up, stating that Latte dock is “…based on Plasma frameworks [and] provides an elegant and intuitive experience for your tasks and plasmoids. It animates its contents by using parabolic zoom effect and trys to be there only when it is needed.”

Not having a history with KDE I can’t tell you how well it compares to other KDE dock apps that (may be) out there, and having borked my own Neon install a few days ago, I haven’t been able to try it out first hand.

But you can.

Install Latte Dock on Ubuntu or KDE Neon

Latte Dock requires Plasma 5.8 or later so if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 16.10 you will need to add the Kubuntu backports PPA to use it. This app does not work in KDE Wayland sessions.

An alpha snapshot of Latte Dock is available to install from the KDE Store but you may prefer to run the development branch, built from source, as the dock is seeing commits almost every day.

Reader Dart has written “a little bash script that automatically installs latte dock on KDE Neon and Kubuntu 17.04” which (as always) you should give a glance over before running.

You can download the script from zippy share or copy/paste it from a mirror here.

If you try it out do let me know what you like or don’t like about it. If you encounter any issues be sure to file a bug report over the Latte Dock Github page.