You can customize your Ubuntu desktop in various ways depending on your preferences. One of these customization options is changing the way your Launcher or taskbar behaves when you expand an application window. By default, when you expand an application, the Launcher retains its place and you are left with lesser screen space for your applications. If we enable auto-hiding for the Launcher, it will only appear when a cursor touches it. Other times, it will stay hidden from the user, sparing more desktop space for you.
In this article, we will help you in enabling the auto-hide option for your Ubuntu Launcher. We have run the procedure described in this article on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system.
This is how your desktop looks like by default, with the Launcher in view all the time:
In order to auto-hide the Launcher, click the system settings either through the Dash or by clicking the downward-arrow located at the top right corner of your screen.
Then click the settings icon located in the lower-left corner to open the Settings utility. Wi-Fi will be selected as the default panel for Settings.
Click the Dock option from the left panel to see the following view:
Now switch on the Auto-hide the Dock button from the right Dock panel. The Launcher will then hide whenever a window overlaps with it.
In the above image, we re-sized the Settings window so that it touched the Launcher and hence the Launcher disappeared. You can access the Launcher simply by moving the cursor to the left corner of the screen.
Through this very simple procedure, you can auto-hide the dock on your Ubuntu desktop. Now you can have more space to yourself for opening and working on your applications, especially the ones requiring a lot of screen area.