♞ Coming up on 9TO5Linux ♞
Budgie 10.6 is Here as its First Release Under the New Organization
Budgie 10.6 has arrived under a new organization and in a new repository, with some impressive
improvements to the platform.
Back in January, ex-co-lead of Solus Joshua Strobl made headlines after leaving Solus
to work on SerpentOS.
However, he still wanted to work on the Budgie desktop environment, so he forked the project
(in a new repository) and formed the Buddies Of Budgie organization.
Three months later, the first release since this organizational change has arrived, which
we will be looking at here.
Budgie 10.6: What’s New?
Seeing as this is the first release since the aforementioned organizational shift, it
is pretty light on features.
Despite this, here is a general round-up of what’s new:
Theming refinements New notification system
Code reformatting With the announcement of the latest update,
Joshua also mentions:
Budgie 10.6 aims to eliminate the divide between traditional “downstream” consumers of
Budgie and the development organization itself, enabling those downstreams like Ubuntu Budgie
to get more intimately involved in its development.
Applying one of our core pillars of being a platform rather than a product, the goal
with Budgie 10.6 and future releases of Budgie is to provide a macrocosm, or a minimal set
of tightly coupled components, and leave the rest of the ecosystem up to the decisions
and values of downstream consumers, be that distributions or end users.
So, if you were worried about the development of the Budgie desktop environment after the
split, this should reassure you.
Theming Improvements
It appears that this release’s theming improvements were almost entirely about improving consistency
and subtle changes for a modern look.
For example, border radii have been applied to some desktop elements, uniform spacing,
the unified color scheme for widgets, and other improvements to the support for GTK
themes.
From my hands-on experience with this release, the changes were subtle but there, and it
did feel as if they brought Budgie more in line with desktops like Gnome and KDE.
New Notification System While not immediately obvious, Budgie has
now received a new notifications system.
The biggest impact of this is that it has now been moved out of Raven, the panel located
on the right side of the screen.
As a result, other Budgie components can now use the new notifications system.
One mentioned example is “unlocking the capability to support notification badges
in Icon Tasklist in the future”.
Again, while minor, this change does open up future options, so hopefully, we can see
these taken advantage of in future releases.
Other Improvements Some other changes in Budgie 10.6 include:
Use of tabs instead of spaces, general reformatting of some code.
Reintroduce support for GNOME 40, to enable Ubuntu LTS support.
Renaming GNOME Control Center to Budgie Control Center.
Fixes to expanding Raven thumbnail causing Raven itself to resize.
If you are curious to learn more, you can find the release announcement on GitHub for
a full list of new features.
Getting Budgie 10.6 If you want to get Budgie 10.6, it would probably
be best to wait for your distribution to package it first.
This will likely take less than a week if you are on Arch, with Ubuntu and its derivatives
taking somewhat longer.
For those feeling adventurous, you could also try compiling it, but you probably already
know how to do that if you’re willing to try it.
Overall, Budgie 10.6 seems to be an exciting release, especially considering its significant
organizational changes.
:: More ::
Budgie 10.6 Desktop Environment Improves Theme and Panel, Revamps Notification System
Joshua Strobl of the Budgie Desktop team announced today the release of Budgie 10.6 as the latest
stable version of this open-source, free, modern, and lightweight desktop environment
for GNU/Linux distributions.
Budgie 10.6 is here 11 months after version Budgie 10.5.3 and introduces improvements
to application grouping, improvements to single-instance application tracking, better support for some
KDE applications, as well as a revamped notification system that’s now standalone and is no longer
part of the Raven notification center, paving the way for new features like support for
notification badges in the icon tasklist.
In addition, Budgie 10.6 adds various refinements to the internal theme and panel, such as border
radiuses on most dialogs, the Raven widgets, and the Panel popover content, unified color
scheme for widgets within the panel, better support for GTK themes, improved readability,
more precise battery levels icons, Clock applet improvements, as well as updated default panel
configuration.
Among other changes, this release renames all the GNOME Control Center references to
Budgie Control Center, renames Budgie Desktop View schema to support its rebrand, fixes
various issues with Raven, and addresses other bugs reported by users from previous releases.
“Budgie 10.6 is not just a reflection of our organization change for the development
of Budgie, it reflects an expansion on Budgie 10.x series with new features and re-architectures,
applying the lessons learned from those into our next-generation version of Budgie.
Buddies of Budgie views Budgie Desktop as a platform rather than a product,” said
Joshua Strobl.
For more details, check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page, from where
you can also download the source tarball if you want to compile it yourself or if you’re
a Linux OS maintainer who wants to integrate the latest Budgie Desktop into your GNU/Linux
distribution.
Anyone else should wait for the Budgie 10.6 release to land in the stable software repositories
of their distributions before updating.
Thanks for watching,
I hope you enjoyed this video,
If you did hit that thumbs up button, it helps me to make good content for you, other then
that, I will see you in tomorrow's video, peace out.