Elementary OS Freya provides only 2 themes, the default transparent and Matte, for its Plank dock launcher by default.

For those who want to try more themes, Ken Harkey has made 13 Plank themes into PPA available for Ubuntu 14.04 and Elementary OS Freya. Here are the screenshot for some of them.

Plank Theme Camilaes

Plank Theme Capeos

Plank Theme Chameleon

Plank Theme Cratos Lion

Plank Theme Darktheon

Plank Theme Pantiva

Plank Theme Paperterial

How to install these themes:

Open terminal from the launcher, and run below command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:justsomedood/justsomeelementary

After that, refresh system cache and install the themes via:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install plank-theme-*

For those who don’t want to add PPA, grab the .deb package for each theme from HERE.

To change your Plank theme, you may install Elementary Tweaks from PPA via blew command, or get it here:

sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks

Then launch System Settings -> Tweaks -> Plank and select a theme from the drop-down box after Theme:

Plank, a lightweight dock launcher, has reached the 0.9.0 release recently with some new features, such as Window Dodge auto-hide and hide/un-hide time delay.

Rico Tzschichholz announced the release on launchpad.net:

“Kanker” is our new feature and bug-fix release on the way to 1.0.

Most notable is that there are now some nice and smooth animations while items are added or removed. Besides that it is possible to set a HideDelay and the good old WindowDodge hide-mode got added. Plank now provides a simple dbus-interface with some methods for remote-controlling. As usual there are changes all over the place which can be studied in the full changelog.

Enjoy,
Plank: Stupidly simple.
Note: There is no stability of ABI/API until further notice!

For Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04 and derivatives, plank dock can be easily installed from the developer’s PPA.

Just open terminal and run below commands one by one to add the PPA, refresh system cache, and install plank:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ricotz/docky

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install plank

Plank, the simplest OS X-style dock launcher, has reached the 0.8.0 release recently with new feature and bug fixes.

“May” is our new feature and bug-fix release on the way to 1.0.

Yet again bunch of more or less subtile bug-fixes and design adjustments. The major feature addition is the integrated settings dialog which is suppose to ease configuring plank and obsolete the need for 3rd party settings tools. Besides that some HiDPI fixes and possible crasher fixes.

For the list of fixed bugs:

• the “folders disappeared and can’t be added again” issue in Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon 2.4
• Plank crashes intermittently when quitting Thunderbird Mail
• Elementary OS 0.3 Freya: item-positions not updated in panel-mode
• Plank cannot handle GVFS URIs on drag-and-drop
• default window icon in dock is ugly
• Display “close” in context menu instead of “close all” when single instance is open
• Don’t show a window list when single instance is open
• Look for theme data in /usr/share/themes too
• Use selected-focused background-color for indicators

Install / Upgrade to Plank 0.8.0:

The binary packages have been made into PPA, available for Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 12.04 and their derivatives.

To add the PPA repository, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/docky

After that, refresh your system package cache by running:

sudo apt-get update

Finally install or upgrade Plank:

sudo apt-get install plank

That’s it. Enjoy!

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.