I've seen a lot of talk about the Dash to Dock extension, but I'm really struggling to see the difference between dash and dock.
As someone who also has extensive experience of Mac, it seems the OSX dock has almost exactly the same functionality as GNOME dash.
What am I missing?
It is terminology. In default GNOME Shell, the "Dash" is the bar with favorites and running applications that appears in the Activities Overview. It is only visible in the Activities Overview, which you see when you click "Activities" in the top bar, or hit and release the Super key.
A GNOME Shell extension, "Dash to Dock" can turn that Dash into what from then on is referred to as a Dock on your desktop. Then, it is directly available on your desktop, and thus behaves much more like a dock in for example MacOS.
In a default Ubuntu install, a custom GNOME Shell extension, Ubuntu Dock, is active. That is actually derived from "Dash to Dock" and uses the same configuration settings. So you already have the "Dock" instead of the "Dash", and do not need to install an additional extension for that.
