One of my new year’s resolutions is to try and use KDE Plasma (as well as other non-GNOME Shell desktop environments) more often — and one of app I’m really excited to try when I do is Latte Dock.
Latte Dock is a Qt/Qml dock app designed for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It’s big on bling, egregious on eye candy, and terrific at app switching.
Latte Dock v0.10 is the latest development snapshot of the task-switcher-come-app-launcher. A couple of neat new features have been added, including support for floating docks and panels.
Floating docks and panels are offset from the edge of the display, causing docks and panels to have a “floating” appearance, sort of how the dock in iOS looks.
Having trouble picturing what I mean? Hit play on this video from Latte Dock’s lead developer Michail Vourlakos. He shows off the nifty new feature in much better detail below:
Latte Dock v0.10 also includes two new visibility modes: “Windows Can Cover” and “Windows Always Cover”. Both behave as they sound.
Install Latte Dock v0.10
Latte Dock v0.10 is not currently “stable”. However, you can choose to build it from source using the code available on KDE Phabricator.
Using Kubuntu or KDE Neon? There is a “testing” PPA maintained by a Kubuntu dev which packages the latest master branch build of Latte Dock for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and up.
Do note that the PPA may, depending on the (k)Ubuntu version you’re running, also require the Kubuntu Backports PPA to be enabled too.