Fluxbox and alternative docks?

[whitt]

i run fluxbox because i like the lightweight, completely / easily tailorable interface... everything is just a quick text edit away, and lightning fast.

i've been noticing i'd like to have a dock though - the default in flux is a little barbaric compared to most other OSs these days.

i tried cairo-dock for a week or two - installed it from an overlay and all was good. but after a system update (don't ask for specifics, i wasn't paying too much attention) cairo-dock just quit responding to input - it opens, and that's it - no response to left or right clicks, nothing. i've rebuilt, updated, removed it and nuked my cache, and reinstalled, but no dice - just a dead, flat, useless image pops up.

so out of curiosity i installed latte-dock (despite it bringing a few million KDE packages along with it) but it literally doesn't do anything - i run /usr/bin/latte-dock and get nothing... there is nothing following the command, just my blinking cursor and nothing else. ^C doesn't kill it, i have to ^Z it, then kill %1 to shut it down.

so - question for the forum: outside of moving to gnome or KDE, what do i have to do to get a functional dock / taskbar in fluxbox? any advice to debug / fix either cairo-dock or latte-dock would be good, or alternatives that are easy to install / setup...

thanks!

[AJM]

On my laptop I use tint2 (though with Openbox rather than fluxbox - I remember using that on my P166 with 32MB RAM!) It does the job just fine with minimal resource usage and I've never seen it crash or cause any issues that I can think of.

On my desktop I use WindowMaker - a habit of two decades standing that I hope not to have to break any time soon!

[whitt]

thanks - i did check out tint2, but i'm actually going the other way - looking for more functional / complicated / something that'll do more for me... it's counter intuitive since i like keeping it simple (hence fluxbox) but i've been surprised at the utility you get from some gnome / KDE applets... like - managing your network connection using a GUI (gasp!) or bluetooth connections (double gasp!) instead of restarting services and working through the CLI, without having to tweak and tweak everything.

[AJM]

I use a GUI for managing my network on my laptop too, as I use it on many different (mostly wireless) networks: I use nm-applet for that.

This is my layout:

https://i.imgur.com/i0sxdZb.png

Tint2 has, left-right; menu button (jgmenu), firefox/chromium/pcmanfm/st launchers, desktop switcher, taskbar area; system tray, nm-applet, battery info, clock.

On this machine my policy is to have as little extra on screen as possible, while not doing away with really useful stuff like clock/battery level/ network config