I am currently running Debian 8. I had this windows task bar like panel at the bottom which was able to auto-hide and add favorites as well as move around the icons. Now I tried task-bar from the gnome extensions and it isn't the one I had before. Does any one have a similar panel that works like I mentioned above? Also In Debian when you mouse to the bottom you have the notification space come out of hiding, is there any way I can turned that off so all that comes out of hiding is the panel I am looking for?
For the dock check 'dash to dock', and edit its settings, iirc u can place the dock at the bottom if you want. As for the icons look for 'topicons', might be what you're looking for