Budgie (desktop environment)

Last updated
Budgie
Original author(s) Ikey Doherty, Solus Project
Developer(s) Buddies of Budgie
Initial releaseFebruary 17, 2014;10 years ago (2014-02-17)
Stable release
10.9.2 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 22 June 2024;5 months ago (22 June 2024)
Repository
Written in C, Vala   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Operating system Unix-like operating system  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Platform X11
Available in71 languages
Type Desktop environment
License GNU LGPLv2.1 for libraries, GNU GPLv2 for binaries
Website https://buddiesofbudgie.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Budgie is an independent, free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems that targets the desktop metaphor. Budgie is developed by the Buddies of Budgie organization, which is composed of a team of contributors from Linux distributions such as Fedora, Debian, and Arch Linux. Its design emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and elegance, while providing the means to extend or customize the desktop in various ways. Unlike desktop environments like Cinnamon, Budgie does not have a reference platform, and all distributions that ship Budgie are recommended to set defaults that best fit their desired user experience. Budgie is also shipped as an edition of certain Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu Budgie.

Contents

Budgie (desktop environment) v10.4 Budgie (desktop environment) v10.4.png
Budgie (desktop environment) v10.4

History

Budgie was created by Ikey Doherty as the default desktop environment for his new Linux distribution, EvolveOS, which was eventually renamed to Solus. The intention was to use GNOME components to create a more lightweight and traditional desktop that still had most of the features that GNOME provided at the time. Development was announced on December 14, 2013, with the first public version being released soon after on February 17, 2014.

Budgie had a flurry of releases in 2015, culminating in version 10 being released in December of that year, a full rewrite of the codebase in the Vala programming language. The desktop soon spread to distributions other than Solus, with SparkyLinux and Manjaro adopting the desktop environment in 2015. Arch Linux, Ubuntu, and Void Linux followed in 2016, with a dedicated "remix" edition for Ubuntu being created, eventually renamed to Ubuntu Budgie when it was adopted by Canonical as an official flavor.

Doherty made his last commit to the repository on 26 June 2018. Later, on October 27, 2018, it was announced that Doherty had ceased communication with the rest of the Solus team for unknown reasons, leaving Solus (and thus Budgie) without a lead developer. Joshua Strobl, one of the members of the newly formed Solus core team and an already active contributor to Budgie, took up the responsibility of continuing Budgie's development after Doherty's departure. [2]

On January 1, 2022, Strobl resigned from Solus [3] and established Buddies of Budgie, a new organization for Budgie development, with other active contributors. Under this new organization, Budgie development shifted from being focused on Solus to being focused on improving the experience across all distributions that ship Budgie. The first release under this new organization was v10.6, released on March 6, 2022. [4]

The desktop had incremental releases in 2022. During this time, contributors to the project that had ceased involvement with Solus began contributing to other Linux distributions. Notably, Joshua Strobl began contributing to Fedora Linux, leading to the inclusion of Budgie in the Fedora repositories and the approval of a Fedora Budgie "spin" to be released with Fedora 38.

In 2023, v10.7 was released, the second major release under Buddies of Budgie, and inclusion of the Budgie package set into both FreeBSD - the first BSD derivative to ship the desktop - and NixOS.

Additional components

Budgie Desktop View

Budgie Desktop View is a software component meant to provide desktop icons within Budgie. [5] Budgie Desktop View is implemented in Vala, and uses GTK 3 for widgets. The source code is available under the Apache License 2.0.

Magpie

Magpie is a fork of the GNOME Project's Mutter window manager with Wayland support removed, principally intended to reduce the maintenance burden of GNOME stack upgrades by stabilizing on a particular version of the Mutter API. [6] Magpie is implemented in C, and its source code is available under the GNU GPLv2.

Budgie Control Center

Budgie Control Center is a fork of GNOME Control Center with Budgie-specific settings and features, and is the standard settings application for Budgie. [7] Budgie Control Center is implemented in C, and uses GTK 3 and libhandy for widgets. The source code is available under the GNU GPLv2.

Budgie Screensaver

Budgie Screensaver is a fork of GNOME Screensaver with additional fixes and minor updates, and serves to provide an authentication prompt when the system is locked. [8] Budgie Screensaver is implemented in C, and uses GTK 3 for widgets. The source code is available under the GNU GPLv2.

Budgie Backgrounds

Budgie Backgrounds is Budgie's default set of background images for use with Linux distributions that do not provide their own, and is entirely composed of public domain images. [9] The source code and images are available under the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 license.

Releases

VersionDateNotes
December 14, 2013Development announced. [10]
1February 17, 2014First testing release. [11]
2March 12, 2014Visual style improvements, additional applets and dialogs. [12]
3June 22, 2014Code cleanup and performance improvements. [13]
4July 12, 2014Introduction of Vala code; animation, menu, popover, and dialog improvements. [14]
5.1July 19, 2014Panel rewritten in Vala, and the addition of a new plugin API for panel applets. [15]
6August 20, 2014New panel editor for custom layouts. [16]
7September 1, 2014Notifications support and a new XEmbed tray applet. [17]
8November 16, 2014Simplified main menu, cleaner animations, and significant theming improvements. [18]
8.1February 5, 2015Rewrite of the window manager and updated interface components. [19]
8.2May 8, 2015Stability and performance improvements. [20]
8.3October 24, 2015Primarily general bug fixes. [21]
10December 26, 2015Rewrite from the ground up. Introduced multi-monitor support, the Raven sidebar, and multiple panels. [22]
10.1December 26, 2015No release notes. [23]
10.2December 30, 2015Vendored nm-applet launcher, new translations, and Raven improvements. [24]
10.3April 16, 2017New alt-tab implementation, MPRIS artwork support, and applet improvements. [25]
10.4August 14, 2017New applets, plus panel, animation, and personalization improvements. [26]
10.5March 17, 2019New applets, improvements to existing applets, improvements to Raven widgets and notification management. [27]
10.6March 6, 2022First release under the Buddies of Budgie organization. Significant improvements to application tracking, internal theme polish, a rewritten notification system, and updates to the default layout. [28]
10.7January 29, 2023Major re-architectures, new APIs for extensibility, and polish to the user experience. [29]
10.8August 20, 2023Merge Trash Applet, add support for Magpie v0, move system tray to Status Notifier. [30]

Adoption

DistributionSince versionSince dateInstallation methodNotes
Arch Linux Rolling2016-03-04Profile
Debian 9 "stretch" [31] 2017-06-17 [31] Manual
EndeavourOS 2019.12.22 [32] 2019-12-22 [32] Profile
Fedora Linux 37 [33] 2022-11-15 [33] Official ISOas Fedora Budgie
FreeBSD 2023-03-04 [34] Manual
GeckoLinux [35] 152.200830.0 [36] 2020-09-01 [36] Official ISO
Manjaro [37] 15.11 [38] 2015-11-02 [38] Community ISO
NixOS 23.052023-05-05 [39] Profile
OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 [40] 2019-06-16Manual
openSUSE [41] Leap 15.02018-05-25Profile
Solus [42] EvolveOS Alpha 1 [43] 2014-07-06Official ISO
SparkyLinux 3.6-dev12015-02-02Manual
SpiralLinux11.220606 [44] 2022-06-22Official ISO12.231120 (latest)
Ubuntu [45] 16.04 LTS2016-04-25Community ISOAs Ubuntu Budgie
Universal Blue382023-04-23 [46] Official ISO
Ultramarine Linux352021-12-16Official ISO
Void Linux [47] Rolling2016-10-09 [48] Manual

Reception

Budgie has been generally well received, with reviews noting its appealing visual design and intuitive layout. Bertel King wrote in 2018 that "Budgie feels like someone took the great things about GNOME, took out all the not so great things, set some great default options, and sent that out into the world." However, King also considered this a negative, writing that Budgie "can feel more like a customized version of GNOME than a separate entity." [49] John Perkins described Budgie as "a beautiful desktop that aims to provide sane defaults and a beautiful interface," while lamenting its limited availability on distributions other than Solus. [50]

See also

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References

  1. ↑ "Budgie 10.9.2 Released". 22 June 2024. Retrieved 27 June 2024.
  2. ↑ "Building an Alternative Ecosystem". joshuastrobl.com.
  3. ↑ "Trouble in Solus Linux land as their Experience Lead quits". gamingonlinux.com. 3 January 2022.
  4. ↑ "Budgie 10.6 Released". Buddies Of Budgie. 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-04-03.
  5. ↑ Budgie Desktop View, Buddies of Budgie, 2022-03-07, retrieved 2022-04-17
  6. ↑ Magpie, Buddies of Budgie, 2023-08-20, retrieved 2023-09-04
  7. ↑ Budgie Control Center, Buddies of Budgie, 2022-02-17, retrieved 2022-04-17
  8. ↑ Budgie Screensaver, Buddies of Budgie, 2022-01-02, retrieved 2022-12-24
  9. ↑ Budgie Backgrounds, Buddies of Budgie, 2022-10-29, retrieved 2022-12-31
  10. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (14 December 2013). "Desktop: Code-Name Budgie". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  11. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (17 February 2014). "Budgie Desktop Available for Testing". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  12. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (12 March 2014). "Budgie Desktop 2 Released". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  13. ↑ "Release v3 · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  14. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (13 July 2014). "Budgie Desktop V4 Released". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  15. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (20 July 2014). "Budgie Desktop V5.1 Released". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  16. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (20 August 2014). "Budgie Desktop V6 Released". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  17. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (2 September 2014). "Bodacious Budgie (V7) Released!". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  18. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (16 November 2014). "Courageous Budgie (V8) Released!". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  19. ↑ "Maintenance release of v8 series for packagers · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  20. ↑ "Release v8.2 · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  21. ↑ "Release v8.3 · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  22. ↑ "Release Awesomely Amazing Open Source Sparkly Wonderness For Your Computerboxen · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  23. ↑ "Release v10.1 (minor change) · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  24. ↑ "Release v10.2 of Budgie Desktop · solus-project/budgie-desktop". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  25. ↑ Strobl, Joshua (April 19, 2017). "Release of Budgie 10.3". Archived from the original on December 31, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  26. ↑ Strobl, Joshua (August 18, 2017). "Release of Budgie 10.4". Archived from the original on August 20, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  27. ↑ Strobl, Joshua (17 March 2019). "Solus 4 Fortitude Released". Solus. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  28. ↑ "Budgie 10.6 Released". Buddies Of Budgie. 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  29. ↑ "Budgie 10.7 Released". Buddies Of Budgie. 2023-01-29. Retrieved 2023-01-29.
  30. ↑ Strobl, Joshua (2023-08-20). "Budgie 10.8 Released". Buddies of Budgie. Retrieved 2023-08-26.
  31. 1 2 "Debian -- Details of package budgie-desktop in stretch". packages.debian.org. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  32. 1 2 Bryanpwo (2019-12-23). "Liftoff for the net-installer!". EndeavourOS. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  33. 1 2 "Fedora 37 Features". It's FOSS News. 2022-09-09. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  34. ↑ "FreshPorts -- x11/budgie: Meta-port for the Budgie Desktop Environment". www.freshports.org. Retrieved 2023-03-11.
  35. ↑ "GeckoLinux - Linux for Detail-Oriented Geckos". geckolinux.github.io. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  36. 1 2 "Release GeckoLinux [NEXT][ROLLING] Budgie editions released · geckolinux/geckolinux-project". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  37. ↑ "Manjaro Downloads". manjaro.org. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  38. 1 2 "Manjaro Budgie 15.11 released – Manjaro Linux – Enjoy the simplicity". 2015-11-26. Archived from the original on 2015-11-26. Retrieved 2023-04-07.
  39. ↑ "Budgie Desktop by FedericoSchonborn · Pull Request #216737 · NixOS/nixpkgs". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-04-03.
  40. ↑ "GitHub - OpenMandrivaAssociation/budgie-desktop at 4.0". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  41. ↑ "Portal:Budgie - openSUSE Wiki". en.opensuse.org. Retrieved 2020-10-02.
  42. ↑ "Download". Solus. 3 August 2016. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  43. ↑ Doherty, Ikey (6 July 2014). "Evolve OS Alpha 1 Released". Solus. Retrieved 2022-09-15.
  44. ↑ "Release SpiralLinux 11.220606 release · SpiralLinux/SpiralLinux-project". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-04-24.
  45. ↑ "UbuntuFlavors - Ubuntu Wiki". wiki.ubuntu.com. Retrieved 2022-09-15.
  46. ↑ "Release v1.0.0 · ublue-os/budgie". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-05-06.
  47. ↑ "void-packages/srcpkgs/budgie-desktop at master · voidlinux/void-packages · GitHub". GitHub . Archived from the original on 2018-05-25. Retrieved 2018-05-25.
  48. ↑ "New package: budgie-desktop-10.2.7 · void-linux/void-packages@27e2bdf". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-12-24.
  49. ↑ King, Bertel (2018-05-24). "What Is Budgie? The Linux Desktop Environment That Feels Like a Chromebook". MUO. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
  50. ↑ Perkins, John (2020-09-10). "Budgie Desktop Review: A Beautiful Desktop that Looks Like Gnome". Make Tech Easier. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
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