The dock is an increasingly important and interesting element for many users. Not only does it make any desk more beautiful but it is also an element that makes the desk more functional and simple. To such an extent the thing goes, that the Unity panel in Ubuntu is used by many as a vertical dock and the request to put the panel in landscape mode is mainly due to this need to use it as a dock.
The official Ubuntu flavors also have the possibility of having a dock without making the flavor lose its philosophy. About Kubuntu we have already mentioned the odd dock; Xubuntu already has an auxiliary panel that works as such, but And lubuntu? Can you install a dock on Lubuntu?
The answer is yes. Lubuntu is an official flavor that has as LXDE desktop, but that does not mean that we cannot have as many panels as we want or docks. It's more, Lubuntu may be one of the desktops most reminiscent of the old Gnome 2, after MATE, of course.
Cairo Dock is a light and beautiful dock for LXDE
To install a dock on Lubuntu, first we have to move the main panel of the desktop. To do this, right click on the panel and select the option "move panel", now we place it at the top, leaving the bottom free for the dock. Once this is done, we will install the dock. The best options are Plank and Cairo Dock. This time we will choose Cairo Dock due to its simple installation and the beautiful aesthetics it has. So we open a terminal and write the following:
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock sudo apt-get install xcompmgr
Now we have to go to Preferences–> Startup applications and add the following code in the box and then press Add or Add:
@xcompmgr -n
Now not only will the dock be added to the login but also the necessary libraries for it to work. We restart the system and now Lubuntu will appear with a dock, if not, we go to applications and look for Cairo Dock, we execute it and within Cairo Dock Configuration options we choose the option to start with the system.
Now we only have to add the applications we want to the dock. The process is simple and the performance as well as the aesthetics that we achieve is interesting Do not you think?
very good everything,: I liked it, the explanations
I use simple but elegant plank 🙂
Something that your article does not mention is the enormous decrease in the performance of the equipment when installing the 'dock'. I remind you that most Lubuntu users have low-resource computers, hence the choice of this 'distro'.
It's much better Docky and as a Compton composer, both are lightweight and come in the Lubuntu repositories.
I have a problem, I have a black background behind the dock that I have not been able to remove, they asked me to install xcompmgr, but it has not solved the problem. I use 16.04-bit Lubuntu 32, if you need more information to help me than I have left, please tell me. I appreciate all the possible help.
I no longer install dock because I solved it in a very simple and beautiful way. The docks make the machine very heavy. I did not install absolutely anything, I simply clicked with the right button on the taskbar, a dialog box opens and you click on «add a new panel», in position it gives you the possibility to put it on the right edge, the left one or at the top (duplicate the task bar) and that's it; then to make it more beautiful I put a transparent background, I made it wide (50px icons) and set it to be hidden. I emptied the entire task bar and added the icons that interested me. In short, I keep something like a dock, that I can put the programs I want and that hides automatically. I hope you have understood and that you like it. Chauuuuu dock