Dash to Panel lives on, thanks to Zorin sponsorship

The handy GNOME extension Dash to Panel will live on, under its present maintainer, after winning financial backing from one of the distros that uses it.

The popular extension for the GNOME desktop has a new sponsor: the team behind Zorin OS has stepped up to fund continued development by the current project lead, Charles Gagnon.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on the negative reactions that Gagnon received when he added a donations button to his taskbar. Since then, Artyom Zorin, co-maintainer of the Zorin OS distro, left this comment:

We last looked at Zorin OS a year ago (and as it happens, The Reg FOSS desk is working on a new story on it right now). It’s based on Ubuntu, but via a collection of extensions it extensively modifies the GNOME desktop for a more Windows-like experience. As we said last time, Artyom Zorin uploaded the original Dash-to-Panel extension, which was forked from Dash to Dock.

Artyom told The Register:

We also asked Charles Gagnon about this change:

Artyom mentioned that they pretty much use Dash to Panel as is now in ZorinOS, so that was very nice of him to reach out and give his support.

He continued:

It’s easy to forget that behind even quite high-profile FOSS projects, there are real people – often, surprisingly few of them – and like anyone, they are hurt when strangers attack their work. It’s good to know that this argument is settled for now. Gagnon confirmed to us that he will keep working on the extension, “keeping it alive with the next Gnome versions,” although right now he has no other changes planned.

Back in 2023 we noted that Zorin OS used some existing GNOME extensions and urged greater cooperation, so we are very pleased to see this happening. Zorin OS goes much further than Ubuntu to modify GNOME’s radical desktop layout into something much more comfortable and familiar to Windows migrants. The company has just released a new version, Zorin OS 17.3, with upgrades in multiple areas. We plan to look at this very soon.

Bootnote
Thanks to Reg reader John Steeves for bringing this development to our attention. ®