Fear ye not, Unity fans as the Ubuntu Dock will still show progress bars and badge counts in Ubuntu 17.10.
Support for the Unity Launcher API has managed to squeak in to the Ubuntu Dock package on Ubuntu 17.10 just before user-interface freezes takes place.
The feature has been in testing by upstream Dash to Dock developers for the past few weeks, but will ship by default as part of the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop.
I wrote an article a few months back lamenting the loss of these useful bits of on-screen display in GNOME Shell, so consider me super pleased to hear they’ll stay on in Ubuntu’s re-package of the Dash to Dock extension.
By adding support for the old API many of the useful on-dock progress bars and badge counts that currently show up on the Unity launcher should now also show up on the Ubuntu Dock too.
This will include things like Firefox download progress and number of downloads (with the UnityFox Revived add-on installed), unread messages in Thunderbird, and in chat apps like Telegram, Skype, and Rambox, and so on.
If you’re already running Ubuntu 17.10 you should receive an update to the Ubuntu Dock in the next few days. If you’re impatient you can force install it from here, though you will need to restart your GNOME session to get it to work.