Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010’s you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this week is now Cairo-Dock 3.6 with the long-awaited port to Wayland, HiDPI display handling, and other improvements.
Cairo-Dock 3.6 is ported to Wayland to mark the project’s return to relevance now in 2025 in working with the many Wayland-focused desktops. Cairo-Dock 3.6 is working with the likes of the Wayfire, KDE KWin, Labwc, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland, and other Wayland compositors. But GNOME/Mutter is not currently supported.
Most features of Cairo-Dock are working under Wayland but there are some known issues/limitations like the lack of global keyboard shortcuts for actions, limited multi-monitor support, some EGL issues, and other bugs. More details on the Wayland support with Cairo-Dock 3.6 via the project’s Wiki.
Cairo-Dock 3.6 also brings HiDPI support for dealing with higher resolution screens and proper scaling… Another important innovation of the past decade.
Cairo-Dock 3.6 also updates the weather applet, improves application detection, and adds integration with systemd.
Cairo-Dock 3.6 can be downloaded via GitHub. Maintained via a separate repository is also the Cairo-Dock 3.6 plug-ins.
