The Dash

When you open the Activities overview, in the left side you can see the dash, a dock bar for your favorite applications and to offer a place for your running applications.

Every icon in the dash can be removed or moved and of course you can also add new icons in the dash. It’s usage is pretty straight, just to click upon the icon and the corresponding application will be started.

When an application is running, its icon on the dash will present a light white glow (in the left picture you could see it under the Firefox and Shotwell icons). Whenever you click the icon of a running application the existing window will be moved in the foreground and made visible again.

In contrast to the old GNOME 2 panel, clicking the icon of an application already visible it will not hide or minimize the visible window, it will simply show it again and close the activities overview.

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Exploring the GNOME Shell (part 1)

When you access to your GNOME 3 desktop for the first time, most probably you’ll see such image, a clean desktop with blue stripes on the background and no icons at all on the so called Desktop.

As you can soon discover, there’s not a classic desktop like the previous GNOME releases (or MS Windows and Apple OS X), no files can be saved on the desktop, neither it reacts to right clicks. This is the default behavior but can be modified to restore the classic desktop with icons in the background behind the windows. We’ll see later how to control the desktop behavior.