 One of the things about free and open source software is that projects come and go Developers sometimes they decide to just quit developing their software sometimes interest change Sometimes they just get burnt out and there's a very popular free and open source program that kitty plasma users are really fond of And that is latte doc and a couple of days ago the maintainer of latte doc has decided to step away from the project He's just got tired of maintaining latte doc a latte doc for one thing being a Plasma kind of add-on is when you develop things like GNOME extensions or these peripheral Applications for GNOME or KDE plasma these desktop environments They often change drastically from release to release and therefore they're gonna break your third-party Applications for example latte doc and I guess this guy. He's just gotten tired of it and he's ready to step away So now KDE plasma users are wondering For one thing do you have to stop using latte doc? Well, it's not going to see any bug fixes So as it breaks and it's going to keep breaking more and more to the point where it's almost Unusable at some point that you probably need to explore other options and today I want to share with you one of the oldest and what I think best options for Linux as far as a doc that you can use with Any desktop environment or window manager and that is Cairo doc So let me switch over to this virtual machine of zero Linux zero Linux as a arch Linux based distribution That uses KDE plasma out of the box and it actually uses latte doc It's part of their customized plasma desktop and of course now that latte doc is going to be a debt project Eventually, they're going to have to explore some other doc options So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and remove latte doc and I'm going to install Cairo doc So let me open a terminal. They have a icon here for console already here in latte doc And let me make the console full screen and let me zoom in and what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a Sudo Pac-Man dash capital R lowercase ns for remove this program and all of its dependencies I want to remove latte dash doc And let me go ahead and remove that and now what I'm going to do Let's do a sudo pac-man dash capital S and I'm going to install Cairo dash doc and Cairo dash doc dash plug dash ends and you really need both packages Even though they're separate packages You've got the standard base doc program and then you have the extensions the plug-ins for the Cairo doc But really you're not going to want to use Cairo doc without all of the nice plug-ins and extensions So really you need to install both programs hit enter and if it asked for a sudo password give it But since I had just entered my sudo password I didn't have to enter it a second time and now that we've got Cairo doc installed Let's launch it and see how it looks so I'm going to go into the plasma menu and just start searching for Cairo doc I'm going to hit enter and Cairo doc did launch, but we still have latte doc running here in the background I'm not exactly sure how to kill a latte doc. I'm just going to do it at the terminal because I can always do Kill all space name of program in this case latte dash doc And it should kill latte doc and of course latte doc is uninstalled It was still running because it was still running but now that we've killed it We'll never see latte doc again And now we have Cairo doc running and some of the plug-ins that were added because we installed the plug-in packages Including things like this music player that's got the album art and then our desktop Applet here where it looks like we only have one desktop, but I wonder if I could switch to a second desktop I'm not exactly sure how to switch to a second desktop here in plasma But if I right-click on the desktop switcher it would allow us to actually add workspaces remove workspaces It gives us a window list so right now we're on desktop one There's no windows open to do anything we could actually show and hide the desktops That's pretty neat for those that like those kinds of workspace switcher applications One cool thing about Cairo doc is it has some pretty cool animations It has this zoom effect many docs do this where when you hover over something it zooms But it also has this kind of beaming effect where it kind of shines there for a split second and Cairo doc is Interesting because it actually has a ton of animations like You're gonna be blown away once you get into the Cairo doc settings. As a matter of fact if I right-click on Cairo doc, how do I get into the settings? I'm gonna right-click here at the front of the doc go to Cairo doc go to configure and This is the configuration window and you can see you can change the position on the screen for example instead of If I didn't want to do the bottom I could do the top But I already have the KDE panel at the top But maybe I want to do the left-hand side of the screen hit apply and now I've got my doc over here on the left-hand side of The screen you can choose whether you want your doc to hide You know so when windows are on top of the doc should it go away Which most people are gonna want that but you can actually make the doc to where it shows all the time You can actually make your doc not a doc. You can actually make it a panel Matter of fact Cairo doc is really nice if you do like standalone window managers floating window managers Especially something like open box. You could actually have Cairo doc essentially be like a panel with a menu system It can be your desktop environment for the open box window manager or whatever window manager you happen to be using So Cairo doc is really kind of window manager Agnostic you know it kind of works with any window manager any desktop environment You notice the doc has these separators here these lines So the first plug-in here of course is that music player plug-in then we have a separator and then we have our standard quick launchers So the next four or five icons. They're just program quick launchers Then we get another separator and then we get like these five folder icons, which are essentially All manager kind of stuff So if I wanted to I could and you can actually see the file manager kind of stuff It actually has sub menus, right? That's kind of neat. So this one here It gives us Disspace it shows me how much of the root partition is being used how much of the home partition is being used That's that's really really cool. We got the dt folder That's just the home folder if I click on it We get a new sub menu that I could get into Yeah, really cool little file manager kind of plug-in here And of course you've got your session applet here where you could log out and shut down reboot and all of that stuff Let's talk about the icon animations by default. It's set to bounce and to pulse Let's see on mouse hover. It's set to pulse. I'm gonna change that to rotate instead of pulse I used to use the rotate effect back in the day and I always thought it was kind of neat It's been years since I've tried this but now when I hover Yeah, they kind of turn into a cube and they rotate and that is a really neat effect I know it's just aesthetics and it really serves no purpose, but I do love that rotate effect I'd probably keep that some of the other effects include wave I'm sure what wave does and I didn't hit apply. Let me hit the apply button and now Now it kind of jiggles. It's kind of like a wobbly icon instead of a wobbly window You get a wobbly icon. Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and change that back to rotate I'm just gonna be old school now on click when you click something. Do you want it to bounce? What do you want it to do by default it has that kind of bouncing effect? But you could change that to do whatever blink bounce pulse rotate wave I think the bounce probably makes the most sense. So I'll probably leave that I'm not crazy about having our desktop switcher like its own separate doc, you know over here by itself I wonder if I could just drag that but I move that now. I can't just drag it But if I right click on it the position is locked me unlock it Now I could drag it anywhere on the desktop, but could I drag it to the dock? I Could go to switcher. I could right click on it go to switcher and there is an option return to doc Ah, and now it's in the doc. Yeah, I think that's a much cleaner look than having it off by itself Let's take a look at some of the other stuff we can do Let's go to the appearance tab and there are a bunch of themes themes Both for the color background of the doc itself and of course icon themes as well So icons right now. We're using custom icons But if I wanted to switch to some of the icons that are installed on the system, for example breeze dark I could hit apply and there are the breeze dark themes You can tell by those light blue older colors, right? So icon size right now. It's set to medium for me That's probably a little big. I think it's taking up too much space, but that's just me a preference thing I'd probably bump that down to small just so it's taking up a little less space that way I can fit more stuff on my Docker panel because I'd probably load that thing up with a bunch of launchers We could go very small if we really want it tiny, but I think small Works for me and you have views choose the default view for the main dock And right now we're looking at the default view, which is just this floating dock But you have 3d plane which if I hit apply on that you can see now instead of what it was before Which was a rectangle that had some rounded corners now It's more of this trapezoid with the rounded corners right this 3d plane look Which would probably look really cool for a bottom dock for the side dock I'm not crazy about and then of course we have the panel option Which would be great for those that you know want a full-size panel This panel option has gaps in between so your spacers they actually expand So, you know, you have the gaps which can be a cool look for me I probably would want to fill that in to where it didn't have those gaps But that's just me personally you have some other options parabolic Which is really weird because it's got you know this thing here going on This is really nice for sub menus for a dock, but not for the main dock itself I wouldn't set the main dock to parabolic then you have rainbow Which rainbow is kind of neat because it's kind of this circular kind of effect But again, I think for sub menus off of your dock that would be fine But not for the main dock itself. I'd probably just stick Honestly, I'd probably just stick with the default for me personally So other than the behavior and appearance tab you also have shortcut keys So you can set key bindings for things you have Current items. So this is what's currently part of your dock setup What what's being shown on the screen. You can see we are left dock here and add-ons So there are a bunch of add-ons a bunch of plugins right now We have our folder shortcuts, you know our file manager stuff here. That is a plugin We have our quick browser plugin. We have the show desktop plugin Which is that workspace switcher? I believe no the switcher is a different plugin So show desktop is something different. We have a login plugin. So that's the logout button here We could also we wanted to add other stuff I could add a weather plugin for example, which added this down here, but I Not going to configure this to actually show my current location or anything on screen So I'll turn that off you have a rss reader plugin now That could be interesting if you had some rss feeds that you you wanted and this You know, I probably would pin this to the desktop So you just have this on the desktop with you know your latest rss stuff That could be kind of cool as well And we have a themes tab here all of these random people's Chiro doc themes There's a million themes out there for chiro doc if you do a quick google search for chiro doc You're going to find a bunch of really gorgeous screenshots. So that's just a little bit of what you can do with chiro doc It's a really nice program. It's actually been around for as long as I've been using linux chiro doc has been around At least 15 years because I remember in the very early days when I first switched from windows to linux On the desktop, you know full time switched to linux on the desktop I remember chiro doc being very popular back then nobody really talks about it now That's kind of like these standalone docs. They've kind of fallen out of favor We had a bunch of these things back in the day But now that I think people are going to start looking for a replacement for latte doc It wouldn't shock me if people don't go back and start looking at some of these programs like chiro doc You know these blasts from the past kind of programs I love every time when I go back and take a look at some of these programs that I used years ago And I kind of forgot about and they remind me of how special especially desktop linux was back in the day Because back in the day it was all about the the weird effects the bouncing and the pulsating and the rotating icons This was back when the compias Compositor was very popular. You guys know about compias Which was the compositor that a boon to Many desktop linux distributions used back in the day that gave you the spinning cube effect And you could draw fire on the screen and we had all these fancy whizbang effects Nowadays we just don't do anymore. It's kind of like Kind of like the linux user space is kind of growing up, right? We don't do things just for fun anymore It's all about functionality rather than style But for me, I do like a little bling on my desktop every now and then now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode dustin gave james matt maxum mimit michael michael paul west Why you bald homie allen armor dragon chuck commander angry die yokai delin greg morris drum urion All his enter paul p sergeant for door polytech realities for less red private steven tools deviler and willy these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys This episode you just watched would not have been possible The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community Do you want to see more videos about linux and free and open source software like kyro doc? Subscribe to distro tube over on patreon. All right guys peace Kyro doc is a full desktop environment minus the window manager