GNOME Do - An intelligent launcher tool for GNOME

GNOME Do is an intelligent launcher tool which makes all your default menus and panels in GNOME redundant. Since last time I had written about GNOME Do, it has gotten only better. Just a glance through the numerous plugins available for GNOME Do will be enough for any sceptic to fall in love with it.

Just to give you a feel of what can be achieved with this marvellous tool, do yourself a favour. After installing GNOME Do in your Linux distribution within GNOME, start it and open the GNOME Do preferences dialog box. Click on the plugins tab and glance through the diverse plugins available for GNOME Do - right from Twitter, to Google tools and more.

Another neat trick is to use GNOME Do as a dock, like in Apple's Mac OS X. To achieve this, the prerequisite is -

Your GNOME desktop needs to run using a composite window manager. You can enable it by opening the System > Preferences > Appearance GUI tool. Then click Visual Effects tab and enable the special effects.

Once you have enabled visual effects, you can use GNOME Do as a dock by simply changing it's theme to "Docky" in the "Appearances" tab of GNOME Do preferences dialog.

The blog I'Been To Ubuntu has a fabulous article on how you can use GNOME Do and a few other packages available in Ubuntu Launchpad repository to transform GNOME into a Mac OS X like Desktop. Really inspiring.

Of course, in Linux, we have another option for a dock such as Avant Window Navigator. Or you can transform your traditional KDE desktop into a Mac OS X.

Can you name a GNOME Do equivalent tool in Windows, Mac OS X and KDE respectively ?