Comment 8 for bug 1407880

If the menu.css workaround is not used, the shadows still appear, assuming shadows are used in the gtk theme at all. This is true even with gtk3.17. Getting them off dock windows requires explicit retheming.

I just reinstalled cairo-dock to test this, checked it both with and without my menu.css file. Shadows without it, none with it. This is a gtk issue where dock windows are not a shadow exception, I also run into it with my current DE, a hacked version of MATE built with gtk3 and supporting custom panel themes. There too I had to explicitly remove shadows. In that case it required gtk widget names not only for the menus being themed but also the top level windows containing them, just so shadows could be removed in the panel theme. Not as ugly when the menus directly abut the panel but still garish at round corners.

Newest cairo-dock version from Debian Unstable is damned nice, menus rendered larger than before, possibly respecting a previously ignored theme element.