I played around with a few dock options, but didn't like the vertical
real estate they required or else the "hideaway then pop up" for my
laptop. The docks were fairly useful on my desktop before I turned it
into a home server as it had that nice big screen... I've read about
unity and GNOME Shell in a couple of magazines, and although they
weren't something I was too keen on, I guess they could grow on me...