Cairo-Dock vs tint2
When comparing Cairo-Dock vs tint2, the Slant community recommends tint2 for most people. In the question“What are the best docks for Linux?” tint2 is ranked 3rd while Cairo-Dock is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose tint2 is:
You can easily tweak the panel and make it very good looking by using tint2-settings.
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Pros
Pro Easy to tweak and make your own themes
Drag and drop, change icons, use effects, etc. It's fun to play with. It's not a basic dock program and the GUI is good.
Pro Cairo-Dock session
Users can choose to launch a stand alone Cairo-Dock session where the dock also serves as a taskbar where all apps are launchable such as in any other DE session. There is a composited version and one without.
Pro Popular and usually found and installed from a distros repo
Due to the popularity and how long Cairo-Dock has been around it is more often than not found in a distros repos, which is very convenient to get the app installed.
Pro Easily themed
Cairo-Dock has built in settings to install and use themes for the dock and icons. Definitely more robust in this are than most other docks available for Linux.
Pro Easy to theme and customize
You can easily tweak the panel and make it very good looking by using tint2-settings.
Pro Lightweight
Very lightweight with minimal resource use. Often used with lightweight window managers.
Pro Feature rich
Despite being lightweight, tint2 provides most options available for system panels including launchers, taskbar, system tray, clock.
Pro Panel as well as dock
Depending on configuration, tint2 can be a panel with taskbar, systemtry, menu, battery etc or as a standalone dock for launchers.
Pro Multi-instant support
Many instances of tint2 can be opened concurrently using different config files.
Pro Works as a simple dock for i3wm
Tiling WMs are great but sometimes the mouse is your friend too! Tint2 can easily be configured as a little dock for i3wm.
Cons
Con No updates since 2016
Certainly no PPAs for modern releases of Ubuntu.
Con Poor/No system theme or icon integration
Docks use their own theme, own theme colors, icons, layout's and theme engines.
Con Hard/Underwhelming to configure
Cairo dock proposes a feature rich tool, tweakable to any degree. The configuration menus are at times inappropriate, shallow and uninteresting, complex to navigate, and prefab-centric. Rarely offering a satisfying preset, and always unsatisfying to tweak.
Con Can be heavy on resources for weaker systems
Cairo-Dock is more on the heavy side when compared to other docks, which is something to keep in mind for those that are on low resource systems.
Con No intelligent hide option
Tint2 provides autohide option but there's no way to autohide it when windows are maximized or overlap the panel.
