XFCE works quite simply. Plank makes a nice, minimal dock. Couldn’t be simpler.
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I like Plank too. In the past it was not compatible with Wayland. Every so often I check again, but I think that’s still the case. I use Plank on Ubuntu 24.04 with Gnome on Xorg.
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Is plank like docker to get a mac like bar on the bottom.
Perhaps it’s my age but I don’t have a problem with mint cinnamon mate or xfrc desktop but I am more interested in productivity than look and feel
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It does look like the Mac launcher. I’m not a fan of Apple, but I do like that launcher.
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I tried docker for a while to look like my mac, but then gave up and stuck the icons on my desktop, plus on the bottom taskbar, plus through the menu ….. how many ways do you need to access the same thing.
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What does Plank do that cant be done with an Xfce Panel?
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It’s more dynamic… i.e. the dock on Mac and Gnome (and Plank) can be used as a launcher and task switcher… Last time I used XFCE with a bottom panel - it wasn’t dynamic - i.e. it was just a launcher… I’ve used Plank on XFCE before - it works mostly and I prefer it to the static bottom XFCE panel.
I used Plank for a few years - but discovered the native dash / dock in Ubuntu (or Pop! or even Fedora running Gnome) was enough for my needs..
Last time I checked Plank still doesn’t work with Wayland… But I can’t run Wayland anyway (due to Synergy - which does sorta work on Wayland now - but - shared clipboard across synergy clients and server doesn’t work - that’s a showstopper for me).
Note : Plank is the “native” dock on elementary Linux…
I’ve tried Cairo dock before - but it chews up compute - Plank is nice and small with a low footprint…
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I thought the mouse was a task switcher?
Showing my age, I guess.
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Eh?
There’s Alt Tab for keyboard task switching… there’s active apps in the top bar/panel if maybe you’re running XFCE (which you can select with your mouse), or active apps in a dock like Gnome’s Dock or some other dock like Plank, or Ubuntu’s “Dash”…
So - I mostly use my mouse to select a running app, or launch it - from the dock…
I have 4 instances of Gnome Terminal (some of them have several tabs running in the same window), two instances of Brave, one instance of Sayonara, one instance of Steam, and one instance of Google Chrome… i.e. the number of dots is how many instances…
I have set my dock / dash to show differently on each monitor (below is my topmost monitor - which mostly just runs MPV streams of TV and my IP security cameras and a terminal with a big clock [ttyclock]) :
I’ve got one terminal, three mpv instances, and that cogwheel is the icon I get for CoolerControl (I think it’s missing a *.desktop file - as I can’t pin it to the dock).
I just located the desktop launcher for CoolerControl (in /usr/share/applications) and copied it to ~/.local/share/applications - and I can now pin it to my dock (which is really Ubuntu’s “dash” that by default they put at the side - like the old unity dash, I re-configure it to go at the bottom) :
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Thanks, I see now.I never minimize anything so I never use the task bar. That is my way of simplifying life. If I need to clear screen space I move to another workspace
Perhaps I never moved into a full DE.
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Hi Neville, 
I don´t need plank for my purposes. The Xfce Panel is certainly enough for me.
In fact I use firetools as my “launcher platform” for starting frequently used apps:
I use most programmes/apps the firejailed way anyway. I need the sandbox. So firetools comes in handy.
For anything else I use the terminal to start my applications.
fish as default shell is perfect for such purposes.
It makes it easy to find the most complicated/long commands in a jiffy.
That´s pretty much all I need for starting apps. 
Many greetings from Rosika 
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You are way ahead of me. I start everything except browser and mailer and viewers from the terminal. I use dropdown menus, not the panel. My panel is mostly load monitors.
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Hi Neville,
By no means, Neville.
There´s nothing special about firetools. It´s just a launcher platform for apps running the firejailed way.
Of course you can create user-defined commands for them, not just plain firejail [application].
env LANG=en_GB:en apt-cache show firetools
Package: firetools
Priority: optional
Section: utils
Installed-Size: 605
Maintainer: Reiner Herrmann <reiner@reiner-h.de>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 0.9.72-1~0ubuntu22.04.0
[...]
Description-en: Qt frontend for the Firejail application sandbox
Firejail is a SUID security sandbox program that reduces the risk of
security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted
applications using Linux namespaces and seccomp-bpf. It allows a
process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the
globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process
table, mount table.
.
This package contains the Qt-based frontend Firetools.
[...]
It´s in the official Ubuntu repositories.
Cheers from Rosika
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I use Mint because it’s frequently and rightly recommended for beginners, and I want to use the same as the people we try to help. Recipients of the recycled Win machines our association passes on to people who lack resources usually take about 10 minutes to get started. This training can be done by relatively inexperienced people.
It’s a pity about the long-standing recurrent ‘Freezing during File Copy’ bug, which seems to strike all version 22 and 22.1 installations. It’s fatal, because our inexperienced users can too easily lose vital data, which usually includes family photos and videos.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=443071
The other day, a machine we had just provided was returned, because of a blank screen on startup. It was the ‘Libpciaccess Update’ bug which affects Ubuntu and probably all derivatives. I know Windows can crash after an update, but to illustrate the need of ordinary users for reliability, contact with some of our users has to be via an intermediary who may have difficulty explaining the problem. More generally, for now there are not many Linux experts around.
The libpciaccessbug has been discussed in various places and I wasn’t too happy with the response or lack of response. The point is important because, in the context of the Europe-wide initiatives, maintaining a suitable distro to the required level will require industrial-scale resources, hence the interest in serious contributors like Canonical. From experience in another mission-critical industry, I can state that setting up and maintaining an adequate quality control system, under good conditions for the employees, is a major and expensive undertaking. In such cases the quality control departement is controlled by a separate entity that might be named quality assurance.
I guess the major clients of Canonical and the other profit-making firms have their own IT departments which can help handle bugs and mishaps. As far as I know, these are the providers of the currently free distributions that allow development of the derivatives like Mint. It will be interesting to see how the situation evolves as Linux users include more and more people who just need to use their computer.
Finally, to answer part of the question, I recently installed Ubuntu 24.04.2 on my own machine, to escape the havoc caused by Mint Freezing. Put simply, I don’t think it’s quite suitable for the users of our recycled machines, and I don’t know what to do.
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Can you define the problem in simple terms. What do Ubuntu and Mint do that is unsuitable.
You said Mint has bugs… we never hear about Mint bugs from anyone else. Are you sure that the bugs are not in the people who set these machines up?
There are lots of other distros apart from Mint and Ubuntu. In my experience they are nearly all reliable. Try a range of distros.
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As implied very simply in my first sentence, the users referred to are beginners, for whom Mint is very often recommended for good reasons. As explained, Mint has two bugs that are particularly serious for ordinary users. One is old and neglected but has recently resurfaced, and the second arising from Ubuntu that should be transient but needs a rapid and well-documented solution.
Those of us doing voluntary work on recycling - as well as many others - don’t have the time or interest to test and learn to support numerous different distributions that present different difficulties. Speaking only for myself, I have always found that, compared to Mint (XFCE usually), Ubuntu is relatively difficult to get used to, and don’t think Ubuntu 24 is an improvement regarding user-friendliness.
It’s often little things, like having to click on the shutdown icon to access settings - the documentation seems to imply the existence of a specific icon. Using the universal shutdown symbol for that seems worse than the famous Windows Start button. I miss the classified selector for applications of Mint XFCE, but haven’t yet tried to find how to change my Ubuntu desktop; I have work to do.
The ‘Freezing during File Copy’ bug is specific to Mint, and possibly only to some versions, hence a relative silence since 2014 though it’s well enough documented. All this is emphasised in the link I gave to the Mint forum. As I explain, it’s really is serious unless the user is more expert than can be expected of most future users when Linux becomes mainstream. I guess that many contributors here and elsewhere have underestimated how serious this is for the intended users. However, some of us are less interested in distro-hopping and so on than on the ongoing evolution to something, proven by many people to be reliable, that’s suitable for everyone who just needs to use their computer [1]. Perhaps we need another forum with a different focus.
[1] Quotation : Microsoft Vista forum on Usenet, about 2007
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I dont understand why that one glitch is going to deter a new user.
Cant you teach people how to deal with it?
No OS is perfect… if you want perfection you will be looking forever.
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@crl can you post how to reproduce this freezing on copy bug? Does a reset recover from this freeze? Does it damage any of the involved filesystems? If so, to what degree? Is the freeze temporary, until the copy is complete, or does the unfreeze when the copy is complete?
I apologize if you already posted these instructions.
Note: I’m just a user (LM 22.1 Cinnamon), not a developer.
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I read the Reddit link and it only occurs when using USB storage. Even then it seems like it isn’t always reproducible. Some USB storage works and some doesn’t. One of the posters said they did have to run a repair on the file system.
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That’s the danger: a new user would not be expecting it and there are plenty of scenarios whereby precious data can be lost. No, you can’t teach a normal non-geek user to manage things like that, which, for a serious mainstream distro candidate, would have been caught and corrected more than ten years ago.That’s why a mainstream distro that survives will need a very high standard of quality control and bug management.
“I would not write Mint off.
There is also Peppermint.”
If in doubt, whatever the user’s skill or interest in operating systems, propose a bit more distro-hopping.
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