User:ScotXW/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. 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
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 (after dropping WnckSync.

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

 * http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Cairo-Dock-3-3-ist-fertig-1979786.html