Set up Xfce panel as a dock replacement on elementary OS

Australians running elementary OS on ageing laptops often want a familiar, expandable dock without abandoning the Pantheon desktop they have grown used to. The Xfce Panel from the Xfce desktop environment offers a lightweight, modular alternative that sits comfortably alongside Gala and wingpanel. It behaves like a traditional taskbar, supports launchers, system trays and applets, and can be tweaked enough to look at home on a clean elementary install whether you are sitting at a study desk in Perth or working from a kitchen table in Brisbane.

This walkthrough covers the steps to install the necessary packages, position the panel where you want it, replace its visual style with something that echoes elementary, and resolve the small quirks that come up when mixing two desktop environments. It assumes elementary OS 8 (Circe) on x86_64 hardware, although the same approach has worked on earlier releases for users in Sydney and Adelaide who have not yet migrated, and the same notes apply whether you source your hardware locally from a Brisbane integrator or import your own parts from overseas.

Why choose Xfce panel as a customisable dock

Xfce Panel has been part of Xfce for over two decades, and that maturity shows in how configurable it is. Each plugin runs as a small standalone component, which means a crash in the weather applet will not take down your entire dock. That resilience is one reason Linux administrators in Canberra and Hobart tend to reach for Xfce components when patching community-facing kiosks and library workstations.

Compared to plank, the default dock seen in some elementary configurations, Xfce Panel offers a window list, a system tray with clock and notification area, and the ability to autohide against any screen edge. It also handles multiple panels, so you can run one along the top for system metrics and another along the bottom for frequently used apps. The trade-off is a slightly heavier footprint and the need to learn a separate preferences dialog, but for someone who likes to tinker in the evening after work in Melbourne, that is part of the appeal.

The panel respects elementary's freedesktop-style notification system, accepts icon themes from elementary-OS-icon-theme, and reads keyboard accelerators defined through dconf. That compatibility means you can keep Hot Corner enabled, continue to use the wingpanel indicator for power and Bluetooth, and layer the Xfce Panel on top without breaking either layer. The panel also keeps a small memory footprint, which makes it a comfortable choice for the modest laptops that often end up at family members' homes after an upgrade cycle in Australia, and where elementary's own wingpanel can occasionally freeze when an indicator crashes, the Xfce Panel simply logs the failure and keeps running.

Installing Xfce panel without switching desktops

Elementary OS users do not need to install the full Xfce desktop to gain access to the panel. A small set of packages from the elementary and Ubuntu archives is enough, and the same commands work whether you are on a fibre-to-the-premises NBN connection in regional Victoria or a 5G gateway in central Brisbane.

Open the Terminal from the Applications menu and run:

sudo apt update sudo apt install xfce4-panel xfce4-goodies

The xfce4-goodies meta-package brings in useful extras such as task managers, status notifiers and clipboard plugins. If you only want the panel itself and a handful of launchers, install xfce4-panel and add other components later as needed. After installation, log out and back in to ensure the required session services are picked up by Pantheon.

To verify the panel is available, press Super and type xfce4-panel -h to inspect its command line options. The binary lives in /usr/bin/xfce4-panel, and configuration files are stored in ~/.config/xfce4/panel. Backups of this folder make restoring a layout quick if you experiment too aggressively on shared machines at a school computer lab or a community workshop, and they also help if you have to roll back after a Pantheon update changes how indicator services are detected.

Configuring the panel layout and items

Once installed, you can launch the panel from the terminal with xfce4-panel to test it, or save it under Session and Startup so it starts automatically with your Pantheon session. From the gear icon, choose Panel Preferences to begin arranging items.

A useful starting layout for an Australian dev workstation running elementary might include a Whisker Menu on the left for application launching, a launcher for Files and Terminal, a window list in the middle, a clock with timezone support for Australia/Brisbane or Australia/Adelaide, and a system tray on the right with network and volume indicators. The Items tab lets you reorder, add or remove entries. The Appearance tab lets you adjust row size, icon size, and background style.

To give the panel a single-row, edge-clinging look that complements plank, set rows to 1, length to 100 percent, and enable "Automatically show and hide the panel" with animation speeds kept low. You can also disable panel shadows if they conflict with wingpanel's rounded edges. Because each item runs as a separate plugin, dragging new applets in is mostly a matter of clicking the plus button in the Items tab and choosing from the available list, which includes everything from a CPU graph to a weather reader that defaults to Australia/Sydney.

For users who travel across state borders, the clock applet is particularly handy because it can show a second timezone alongside the local one. Lawyers and traders who need to keep an eye on Asia opening hours can pin Singapore or Tokyo next to AEST without leaving the desktop, and the same trick works for anyone who keeps family connections in other countries while running their day-to-day work in Perth or Darwin time.

Styling Xfce panel to match elementary aesthetics

The default Xfce Panel theme uses grey gradients that can clash with elementary's flatter look. The good news is that the panel supports custom CSS, icon themes and background images, so matching it to Pantheon is mostly a matter of picking the right settings.

In Panel Preferences, switch the Appearance tab background mode to "Solid color" and choose a neutral hex such as #2b2b2b or the lighter #c0c0c0 used by wingpanel's light mode. Keep the icons set to elementary's default icon theme, which the panel should already inherit. For a true dock feel, drop the height to around 32 pixels and remove the outer spacing. The result is a slim bar that does not interrupt the calm, modal feel of Pantheon.

If you want to go further, edit the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css to adjust internal panel padding. A small rule such as xfce4-panel background: transparent; makes the bar fully transparent so only the icons and clock are visible. Pair this with a borrowed plank styling and you have a clean hybrid suitable for showing off at a linux.conf.au-style community event in Brisbane or posting screenshots in an Australian elementary OS forum.

Running the panel smoothly alongside plank

Mixing Xfce components with elementary's own dock does cause some overlap, especially on smaller screens. The most reliable approach is to disable plank's autohide entirely and keep it permanently hidden, then let the Xfce Panel do the dock work. You can do this by running gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false to avoid double icons, and by setting plank's dock-items to exclude what the Xfce Panel already exposes.

A second common overlap is the network manager icon, which both plank and the Xfce system tray will claim at the same time. Disabling the network applet in the Xfce Panel Preferences keeps the wifi menu under wingpanel's control and removes the duplicated menu that confuses new users in regional training sessions.

You will also want Xfce Panel to resume correctly after suspend, which is a common concern for laptop users commuting between Sydney and Wollongong or between Adelaide and the Barossa Valley. Adding xfce4-panel --restart to a small helper script bound to the resume hook takes care of it. For accessibility-minded users, combining a custom panel with the keyboard tweaks covered in the a-guide-to-elementary-os-s-accessibility-shortcuts-and-sticky-keys article yields a layout that is friendly to one-handed operation.

When troubleshooting, the panel keeps logs under ~/.xsession-errors, and running xfce4-panel -q quits cleanly so you can relaunch it from a terminal. Most configuration glitches come from plugin paths being moved after an upgrade, so re-adding items in Panel Preferences is faster than editing the XML by hand. A quick dconf reset -f /org/xfce/panel/ returns the layout to a known good state without touching other system settings.

Begin by installing only the xfce4-panel package on a test session and launching it once from the terminal to confirm it draws correctly against your current wallpaper and monitor arrangement. Once that first run looks right, save it to autostart through the Startup Applications pane, then refine the items one at a time over the next few evenings until the panel feels like your own.