I’ve been using Ubuntu for years on my desktop workstation – about 5 years now in total. I’ve been through so many revisions of Ubuntu it’s not funny – and as we all know in the beginning upgrading wasn’t really all that fun (because you never knew what would happen).
Ubuntu as an OS has become more stable than ever – with months and months in between my reboots. I haven’t had a crash or lockup of any kind of 3+ years – but one thing really pissed me off about a year ago – the “Unity Bar”.
Ubuntu took it upon themselves to reword the desktop interface and paradigm as “they saw fit”, putting into place this rediculous left facing menu dockbar thing called the “unity bar” and this little icon on the top left to segregate all your apps into “media apps”, “internet apps”, and “all apps” categories.
This horrible interface has pissed off more people than I know because it just makes harder to find things. They might think it’s easier becase you can type in a few letters to find what you want – but you shouldn’t have to use your keyboard to find an app. You shouldn’t have to scroll through all your apps find it either.
One of the very first things I googled was “how to remove the unity bar in ubuntu” and come to find out (as part of the system) you really can’t. You can’t really replace it, or re-mix it, re-work it, you’re just stuck with that POS.
Today I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 and decided to check out the ubuntu software center to see what’s new – and low and behold there’s a system utility called “Cairo dock”. While it’s not really a replacement for the unity dock (and you still can’t remove it), it might be a good solution for you – it was kind of just what I was looking for (and I’ll tell you why).
First of all – fire up “ubuntu software center” and find “cairo dock” (under system utilities) and install it. Once installed you’ve have the option to run Open GL (Compiz like) version, or non Open GL. I love the Open GL version (uses very low system resources).
So – this is why I like the Cairo dock…it’s like the Macbook App bar (but better). I can’t show it here, but the left icon for the very leftmost icon is the “applications menu” which is exactly what you remember it to be (before the Unity dock bar came out). You have access to icons for programs you have open and most used programs, shortcuts, folders, and more.
You can even right click add / remove / modify any launchers on the Cairo dock, you can add custom applets, apply themes, and more! If you want to get your productivity back in your Ubuntu desktop – install Cairo dock!
