In this article, we will show you a few methods for customizing the dock panel in the default GNOME desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux.
GNOME is the default desktop environment for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, and one of the first things you’ll see on your desktop is the dock panel to the left of the screen. The dock panel is highly customizable, so it’s easy to tailor it to your liking.
In this tutorial you will learn:
How to adjust dock panel appearance in settings menu
How to use dconf-Editor for granular dock panel settings
How to adjust settings via command line
How to revert undesirable changes to the dock panel
Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user
Basic customization in Ubuntu 22.04 settings
GNOME provides us with some basic customization options in the settings. Navigate to Settings > Appearance to toggle auto-hide, adjust icon size, and choose the position of the dock.
👁 Adjust appearance in Settings menu Adjust appearance in Settings menu
By default, these are all the options you’ll find for customizing the dock panel. If you’d like more control over how it looks on your system, it’s necessary to install an additional tool like dconf-editor. To get started, open a command line terminal and type the following Linux commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install dconf-editor
After it’s intalled, you’ll be able to access it inside the Activities window, as seen here:
👁 Open Activities and then dconf-Editor Open Activities and then dconf-Editor
Inside dconf-Editor, you can find the dock panel settings by navigating to this schema: org > gnome > shell > extensions > dash-to-dock
This menu provides convenient access to a lot of customization that isn’t otherwise possible, but you can also utilize dconf-Editor via the command line.
For example, the following list of commands will yield the result shown in the screenshot below:
$ gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock extend-height false
$ gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock dock-position BOTTOM
$ gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock transparency-mode FIXED
$ gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock dash-max-icon-size 64
$ gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock unity-backlit-items true
Experiment with your own values to get the dock panel looking exactly as you’d like. If you end up with an undesirable result and have trouble reverting things back, use dconf-Editor’s reset directive to revert a setting to its default.
For example, we set the dash-max-icon-size to 64 above. The command to revert this setting would be:
In this tutorial, we saw how to adjust the dock panel on the GNOME desktop environment in Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. Through the use of the default settings menu and the extra settings found in dconf-Editor, you are now capable of editing the dock panel to look any way you want.
