Avant Window Navigator (AWN/Awn) is a dock-like navigation bar for the linux desktop that positions itself at the bottom of the screen. It can be used to keep track of open windows and behaves like a normal window list. More info »
I used to use this in Linux Mint but I kept running into an issue where the dock wouldn't store persistent state (ex. it wouldn't load custom icons that I set after a reboot). I switched to Cairo Dock and it 'just works'
Have been using this for a while (moved from Cairo due to jittery animation problem, perhaps caused by my GPU, but still, AWN is very smooth and fluid in the animations.)
I've been running the trunk version for a while and it's shaping up very nicely! It makes a great panel replacement if you're not happy with what you have. I never have problems with it eating up resources or crashing. In the worst case, an applet might crash and all I need to do to remedy the problem is click on the applet to restart it!
I can do pretty good at looking like the Mac dock, but for me it was always far too slow. It would bog down my system and I just could not do anything at good speeds, so I uninstalled it.
