Option to move Dock to left or right screen edge

[JPLeBreton]

There was a wide range of discussion in the new dock thread but since most of that work has been delivered now, and this wasn't part of the 8.0 dock feature set, I just wanted to post this lest it fall through the cracks. Originally raised in this issue, there are users who prefer, on various ergonomic or accessibility grounds, to have their dock along the left or right screen edges rather than the bottom, and for whom the "auto-hide" feature of the dock isn't an acceptable trade for reclaiming vertical screen real estate (which, to be clear, is only one of multiple difficulties one could have with dock-on-bottom).

Understandable why 8.0 shipped with dock-on-bottom given the heavy lift of completely rewriting it for Wayland, but adding this option seems like a good next step for taking the new dock beyond its initial 1.0 functionality set. Thank you Elementary team, and keep up the great work!

[1280px]

IIRC not having this feature is now a design choice, so that the apps menu won't overlap on it or sth like this...

You can either use Plank (won't work on Wayland), or move to another DE/distro (which is what I did).

[JPLeBreton]

not having this feature is now a design choice

That was how I read some of the discussion in the thread I linked as well; what I didn't hear was "no, we're never doing that / we're ideologically opposed to it". I offer this suggestion in the spirit of design choices not being things that are made once and etched into stone forever, but are rather continually validated or dissented by user experiences and can be (carefully) revised or expanded.

[teamcons]

The biggest hurdle in the end i think would be the maintenance aspect.
Who does it ? Who maintains it ? Who maintains it through every other design choice, into something clean and stable and future-proof ? Cf also the other elements i mentioned,
Behind the scenes: Who deals with also the Gala aspect ? Who deals with the window switcher component ? And its cohesiveness with the workspace flow ? How does the switcher look like if on the left, right ? What bugs does that all introduces ? In all of the possible scenarios of all of the possible eOS users at various levels of exotic ?

Danielle has a whole DE and infrastructure to keep track of, and more behind and all of the others are volunteers.
Ive contributed code too. But there could be fifty people flocking on here insisting to do it - Suggestions arent pull requests and testing time. i dont have the skill, another core dev person may not be motivated, or too busy (Photo port is stuck, Zeebok is busy with life. Files gtk4 rewrite is a massive undertaking.)

One of the Leo went in on the switcher. I can see the efforts going in, and Gala also has a lot of unmerged work to resolve merge and test and is in a bit messy state in Git it feels like ? The switcher also laid around for quite a while before anyone moved on it.
Also im waiting personally also for some stuff decided since one or two years ago.

Even myself on the contribution aspect, i have like four projects for eOS sitting still. Im sure people would love them. But i dont have time. I dont have energy. Theres already testing and helping others, and IRL being chronically ill and burnt out and social life and else.

Im with you JPLeBreton. I think it would make sense. Hopefully you dont read this harsher than i say it. But the uncleared design questions aside, even if they were solved, it wouldnt make the feature appear all of a sudden, and i think a lot of people who ask for features forget too often.

[teamcons]

You can either use Plank (won't work on Wayland)

Not 100% super true (despite me also doing that claim), plank is being worked on and considering the goal is cinnamon and cinnamon is going for wayland (one day), it may get support one day too: https://github.com/zquestz/plank-reloaded
Cairo-Dock seems also to have a revival of sorts and having initial Wayland support. Im not sure how well though.

I personally agree on the ability to move the dock.
An argument that i felt was very legitimate blocking this was the application-menu on the left blocking sight. Some other design ideas for the UI are floated around, like the appmenu in the dock (i personally could see it in the center of wingpanel) , which would make the argument moot if approved.

else im not sure what else could be against ?... Maybe the workspace switchers being arranged following workspace direction (horizontal) clashing with this - Im not sure how that could be resolved. A vertical dock in L shape would be a bit awkward... Or a workspace flow becoming vertical along with the dock and switcher ?

The "providing one default, but doing it good instead of several somewhat broken configurations" would be legitimate, especially with the reduced manpower we have. But if it ruled everything there wouldnt be a system settings app at all...