Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, made a decision recently to move away from the Unity desktop environment project and come back into the fold by switching to GNOME. Now a new development branch of the upcoming release shows how the new left-hand panel could look.
Canonical has based its dock on the Dash to Dock GNOME Shell addon but has been making some alterations to make it better suit its requirements. Firstly, the settings UI has been removed in the fork. The settings allowed users to adjust the location, size, behaviour, and look of the dock. In order to edit the dock in Ubuntu, users will be forced to make changes through the dconf-editor app.
A few of the dock settings will also be available through the Control Centre too including the ability to enable intellihide which makes the dock hide when it’s in the way of a window.
Including a dock that replicates the basic function of Unity is a sensible move by Canonical. Ubuntu tends to be the first port of call for Linux newbies so keeping some sort of familiarity with the user interface will means less people getting scared off by new changes.
Source: OMG Ubuntu