Looking for a lightweight dock launcher for your Ubuntu Desktop? Well, Plank may be the best choice.

Plank is meant to be the simplest dock on the planet. The goal is to provide just what a dock needs and absolutely nothing more. It is, however, a library which can be extended to create other dock programs with more advanced features. Thus, Plank is the underlying technology for Docky (starting in version 3.0.0) and aims to provide all the core features while Docky extends it to add fancier things like Docklets, painters, settings dialogs, etc.

Plank is the default dock launcher in Elementary OS Luna. See the screenshots:

Right click on an icon on Plank allows to lock/unlock icon and switch between opened windows.

There are three themes by default, but the only way to apply a theme is rename the theme folder in /usr/share/plank/themes

Install Plank:

It’s easy to install Plank in Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint and their derivatives via PPA repository.

Just press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens run commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/docky

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install plank

After that, open it from Unity Dash or Menu.