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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app.

So, not a Dock.

People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click.

Same for launching an application via keyboard / doing a calculation / finding an emoji. People just want something akin to Spotlight (think uLauncher on Linux). Something lightweight that pops over and allows them to quickly do the thing, without a lot of visual clutter happening and then happening again in reverse.

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I don't want to do that! And, I am in fact a person. I do not want to switch applications by clicking on things with my mouse at the bottom of the screen. I want to switch applications with keyboard shortcuts or with touch gestures, which GNOME has great support for; and both of those can open the dock too (although you can also alt-tab and skip the Expose-style feature).

Again, it's just a matter of preference and taste. My taste is much more strongly in GNOME's default direction than KDE's default direction.

> People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click.

for switching between programs, gnome is designed around workspaces instead of stacking and covering windows so you aren't expected to fly into the expose view to switch apps you just swipe to the side to your other program (or scroll in the corner with the mouse, or press meta+alt+left or right).

For launching programs just press meta and type the first couple letters of it's name. This is exactly the same how I open software on windows, and imo it's quicker due to not taking my hands off the keyboard.

I think it's silly to look at a new desktop and be mad at it for not behaving exactly like other desktops. If you grew up using computers that behaved like gnome you'd likely be just as uncomfortable with a stacking based desktop like windows.

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