dock disappears after apt dist-upgrade, needed to install gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock by hand, restart gnome-shell, and enable extension in tweaks

[Jonathan Kamens]

I did an apt dist-upgrade and got a message telling me that gnome-shell had crashed and asking if I wanted to report it. I figured it was just something funky about the upgrade so didn't bother. Instead, I restarted my machine just to get everything back into a sane state. Upon logging in after doing that, I had no dock.

I dug around to try to figure out what was going on, and finally stumbled upon the description for "Ubuntu Dock" in gnome-tweaks, which told me to install dash to dock.

So I installed that with apt and then restarted gnome-shell and then restarted gnome-tweaks and then enabled dash to dock and finally my dock was back.

This is, shall we say, not an ideal upgrade experience.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 19.04
Package: gnome-shell-extension-ubuntu-dock 64ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.19.0-13.14-generic 4.19.20
Uname: Linux 4.19.0-13-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu21
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Feb 22 10:05:57 2019
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-01-02 (51 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" - Release amd64 (20181017.3)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: gnome-shell-extension-ubuntu-dock
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to disco on 2019-01-21 (31 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. Indeed not an "ideal upgrade experience" but that's part of using a non stable serie of Ubuntu. The problem is that the dock migrated out of disco-proposed before the new gnome-shell version did, you can either downgrade to the previous version of ubuntu dock or get the new gnome-shell version out of proposed

[Jonathan Kamens (jik)]

Can you clarify? Do you mean that the new version of gnome-shell has the dock functionality built in, or that it has a dependency on the dash-to-dock deb which means when the new version of gnome-shell is installed dash-to-dock will get installed automatically?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Gnome Shell does indeed have its own dock built-in, which you will see whenever the Ubuntu Dock is missing or broken. But the built-in one may also hide by default (until you click Activities).

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 19.04 (disco) reached end-of-life on January 23, 2020.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in.