Remove Dock

Question

I would like to remove the dock (or at least disable it). I do not want it popping up when I move my cursor to the bottom of the screen, nor do I want to locate it anywhere else on the desktop.
Can I get rid of it?

Answer 1

Unless you replace it with third party enhancements & system tweaks, it probably isn't a good idea to remove the Dock. For instance, the Trash lives on the Dock & you cannot normally see it in Finder, so emptying it becomes tricky. Perhaps more importantly, the Dock runs early in the login process & is among the last to quit when you log out. A lot of problems that cause (among others) Finder not to launch at login occur later in the login sequence, making Dock one of the few reliable ways to access troubleshooting & repair tools in the event of trouble. (Spotlight is another, but in my experience Dock is more reliable.)
Of course, for this to work, you have to have shortcuts to items like Terminal & Disk Utility somewhere on the Dock. For this reason, I have a "Favorite Utilities" folder in the Dock, filled with aliases of all my troubleshooting & repair apps.
If you are mostly annoyed by the size & intrusion of the Dock popping up, perhaps reducing it to the smallest possible size would suffice?