So having recently rebuilt a couple of machines recently I was missing a few of the tweaks that I’d used in the past, so here for my future reference are the commands required to disable the Dashboard and also make the Dock appear to be flat.
Using Terminal (which can be found under utilities:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES killall Dock
And to re-enable
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO killall Dock