The lead developer of Latte Dock, a popular dock application for KDE Plasma, has announced they are ‘stepping away’ from the project.

In a short blog post titled ‘farewell’ Latte Dock creator Michail Vourlakos (who is better known by the handle ‘psifidotos’) says they no longer have the “time, motivation or interest” to continue development of the app.

“I hope that this will give free space and air for new developers/maintainers to step in and move Latte forward,” they add.

“For the last 6 years developing Latte was a beautiful journey and taught me plenty new things. I would like to thank you all for that beautiful journey, kde community members, users, developers, enthusiasts and plasma developers.”

Now, I’m not world’s most competent KDE Plasma user but I have played with Latte Dock from to time (and written about it once or twice on omg! ubuntu!) and always been impressed.

Dock apps can be incredibly simple launchers, but Latte Dock has always had much grander ambitions. To call it a ‘dock’ is an understatement as it’s more versatile, configurable, and customizable than similar tools available for other desktops.

So what happens next?

Well, given the popularity of Latte Dock it is likely that someone else will step in to maintain the app going forward. And the app itself will continue to work as well today as it did yesterday.

Further feature development on Latte Dock is a harder ask, but by no means improbable – this is open source software after all.

Want to get involved? Head to the Latte Dock KDE Invent page.

h/t Scotty Trees