When you say 'dock', do you mean the top bar? Well, that would be a development. If you mean a menu of application icons at the bottom, I never had that in GNOM

When you say 'dock', do you mean the top bar? Well, that would be a development. If you mean a menu of application icons at the bottom, I never had that in GNOME 3 on Fedora. I actually like GNOME 3 as a desktop: the streamlined process of hitting the Super key or moving the mouse toward the corner and typing in the application name that I want to launch, with the whole screen used for the preview. I also never put anything on the desktop (as in icons, files etc.). Even saying this I get strange flashbacks to 2000s computing. What pushed me away from it at the end (to KDE) was the applications. The trend in GNOME is clearly removing or at best hiding everything except the barest minimum required for pretending we have an app. At some point it shifts from very annoying to unusable. And now I'm putting up with KDE's own weirdnesses, like insisting on creating a cryptographic wallet for everything, or broken hibernation on desktop (a.k.a. big people computer). I hope it's just standard Linux jank and not sign of decline of the space.