Budgie Is Worth a Try
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"Budgie is based on GTK and the GNOME Shell."
To clarify, Budgie is NOT based on GNOME Shell. Budgie uses gnome-settings-daemon, GTK, and Mutter. It's written with GTK, C, and Vala, whereas GNOME Shell is written in C, St, and JavaScript. Budgie 11 isn't going to use any GNOME applications, its settings daemon, or Mutter. May not even use GTK (but rather EFL).
"originally developed for the distro called Solus"
It is still developed for Solus primarily.
"Another nice feature is the extensions that are baked into the Budgie Extras app, shipped together with the desktop."
This is part of the Ubuntu Budgie experience, not Budgie itself.
"These extensions are all developed by the maintainers of the desktop environment, so breakage is not really expected."
As the developer of Budgie, no these are not all developed by the maintainers. Many of them are developed by Ubuntu Budgie, whereas I use and develop on Solus. Breakage is to be expected and has occurred in the past, leading me to have to triage these issues filed against proper upstream rather than Ubuntu Budgie's extras repo.
"One of these extensions is a global menu that works wonderfully, and supports all my applications"
This is not one which is developed by us (Solus).
"The print screen keyboard shortcuts known from GNOME don't work by default"
Works under Solus.
Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on the same OS installation- That's how much it shares with GNOME. If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app, it *will* affect your Budgie session.
Maybe you shouldn't say it's "based off of GNOME Shell", but it's probably accurate to say that Budgie is an alternative Shell for GNOME.
Also, I remember a ton of hype for Budgie 11 from years ago already. And that was when Ikey was still smashing out code for the project. I even remember Solus devs at the time saying they might never actually do version 11 because they had fixed and worked around some of the issues that they thought they wouldn't be able to in 10.4(?).
So, is Budgie 11 actually going to happen?
GNOME Shell is not the same as the rest of the stack.
"Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on the same OS installation"
Yes, it absolutely can. You can use GDM and log in to both.
"If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app, it will affect your Budgie session."
It entirely depends on what settings you change. For displays, that generates the mutter related configurations which are used by Budgie because Budgie uses Mutter. Networking is related to NetworkManager and not GNOME. Notifications is something we intentionally hook into for filtering apps in Raven but can trivially be changed, we even have our own set of exclusions. Search doesn't apply to Budgie, that is specific to GNOME Shell. Applications is primarily oriented towards Flatpak. Most of the screen locker functionality isn't related because we use slick-greeter+lightdm+budgie-screensaver (a fork of gnome-screensaver).
Sound can be independently managed, we do that via Raven for example (which ties into Gvc). Power settings leverage a mix of gnome-related settings and upower. Mouse settings are primarily related to libinput. I could go on.
"Maybe you shouldn't say it's "based off of GNOME Shell", but it's probably accurate to say that Budgie is an alternative Shell for GNOME."
Not really. There are many settings we expose which are not related to GNOME or GNOME Shell at all.
"I even remember Solus devs at the time saying they might never actually do version 11 because they had fixed and worked around some of the issues that they thought they wouldn't be able to in 10.4(?)."
Yes and then Ikey, the project founder, let and I took over in late Budgie 10.4 and my first release was Budgie 10.5. I went back and fixed issues that previously were implied to only be fixable in Budgie 11.
"So, is Budgie 11 actually going to happen?"
Yes however it is not a priority over other aspects of Solus development.
> Yes, it absolutely can. You can use GDM and log in to both.
>> If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app, it will affect your Budgie session.
> It entirely depends on what settings you change. For displays, that generates the mutter related configurations which are used by Budgie because Budgie uses Mutter. Networking is related to NetworkManager and not GNOME. Notifications is something we intentionally hook into for filtering apps in Raven but can trivially be changed, we even have our own set of exclusions. Search doesn't apply to Budgie, that is specific to GNOME Shell. Applications is primarily oriented towards Flatpak. Most of the screen locker functionality isn't related because we use slick-greeter+lightdm+budgie-screensaver (a fork of gnome-screensaver).
> Sound can be independently managed, we do that via Raven for example (which ties into Gvc). Power settings leverage a mix of gnome-related settings and upower. Mouse settings are primarily related to libinput. I could go on.
This is exactly my point. Of course you literally can install Budgie and GNOME Shell next to each other. But the very fact that they step on each others' toes is what I meant when I said "comfortably".
The fact that you basically have to guess what settings will affect the other DE is my point. It also happens to some extent with all DEs- you have to have an intuition for what settings are "system" settings and which are "desktop" settings. But I remember being frustrated in particular that some settings, especially with regard to Mutter, affected the other DE. Neither desktop's settings actually refer to Mutter explicitly, so how is a user supposed to know that changing the window decorations or the double-click-titlebar behavior is going to transfer? I also vaguely remember some settings being exposed in one DE's settings app, but not the other's, but that setting actually having an effect across both (likely Mutter and Gnome Tweaks, if I had to guess).
I'm just saying- I recommend not running both Budgie and GNOME Shell.
I use Fedora and one of the big reasons is Wayland. I understand there are some usecases for which it doesn't work well for people and that's exactly why I think it is important to use it as much as possible to help get those ironed out. We need to move on from X.
At this time, we do not support Wayland, that is correct. We leverage a fair few X11-specific APIs and include support for XEmbed-based system tray icons (you would have to pry system tray icons from my cold dead hands :D). Not saying it won't ever be supported, but that wouldn't be addressed until we move to our own window manager at the very least.
[0]: https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/system-tray-i...
[1]: https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierIt...
What are Budgie's Wayland plans and how are they influencing/influenced by the switch from Mutter? What other reasons are there to switch?
- Zorin Lite (Xfce) - https://youtu.be/NrC0zTqkvbU?t=96
- Deepin (QT) - https://youtu.be/WlB_1kQL0nQ
- Garuda (KDE) - https://youtu.be/KK280Y0cNmQ
- Manjaro (Gnome) - https://youtu.be/N1xem3UdgB8
- Pop! OS (Gnome) - https://youtu.be/HAHLx9RekW4
Did checkout Solus/Budgie which looks nice & minimal but wouldn't exactly consider it a standout.
Haven't used a Linux Desktop as a daily driver for over a decade so haven't been keeping up to date with the state of the Linux Desktop and was surprised to find these fringe distros looking nicer than some of the larger more mainstream ones I used to run.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/12/10/meet-...
If you're on Android:
- plug your phone into your PC
- open chrome://devices on your PC
- open a new tab on your phone
- find the tab you just opened on the PC side and hit 'inspect' (or 'inspect fallback' if there's a version mismatch alert)
- ensure 'preserve log' is checked in the network tab
- if you want you can paste the URL on the PC side
s/PC/Mac/ as applicable
Now you can go digging: once you've located the first evil request, select it and the Initiator tab should tell you what loaded it.
Nobody else can repro, so the root cause may be interesting.
I'm really happy to see Solus continuing development, especially after it's original creator left the project.
I'm very happy with the state of Linux DE's these days. The haters are always gonna hate but Budgie, Pantheon, Cinnamon and MATE are all light years ahead of where we were not long ago. And like other posters have mentioned, we are also witnessing a decay in the quality of MacOS.
Keep up the great work Linux DE developers!
Last time I tried this, XFCE was quite adequate. Not much customisation or anything fancy but I don't need it for a KODI-like machine anyway.
So I wonder: is Budgie a viable candidate? Screenshots around the net look really nice but I'm skeptical how lightweight is it. For example, can I play 60FPS movies? RAM usage isn't a concern; the server has 32GB of it.
Apologies if all this comes off as a bit naive; I deliberately have mostly avoided Linux desktop so far and I'm now finding myself in a position when I don't know much about it.
I don't say "faster" because I didn't do any before/after quantitative benchmarks, but my experience has been that Budgie provides a responsive UI.
The thing that finally got me was that the workspace switcher came with a 300ms timeout before switching workspaces after hitting the shortcut.
Ubuntu Budgie + https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto makes this a great experience by letting me re-use muscle memory (the key left of space + space => global menu; the furthest-left key + arrows => workspace switching).
I had grown increasingly pessimistic with my personal computing choices. I'm into the philosophy of truly owning and controlling my stuff, so I run free operating systems exclusively on my personal machines, including my phone (to the extent that it's possible with the firmware blobs, etc).
But all Linux desktops are pretty rough around the edges. It really disappointed me that I've never had a Linux machine that just worked perfectly. It was always something- xmodmap would just stop working in Plasma, settings wouldn't stick in Xfce, GNOME's sloppy focus doesn't work consistently, etc.
I started to get bummed out until I've been working on this Macbook Pro for work. The stupid thing can't even keep the background images correct. First of all, you can't just say "Please use this same image/color for all desktop background on all screens." So you set every background to the same thing manually, like some kind of animal. Then you plug your laptop into your two monitors at home and one of them has the default wallpaper! Okay, so you set that one to the image you want. Great. Then you go back to the office and plug into those monitors again and one of THOSE is somehow back to the default wallpaper! It happens every time I plug back into a different set of monitors!
Now I'm not pessimistic anymore! Nothing works. It's great. We're all equal. A trillion dollar company can't even make an OS that sets the wallpaper correctly (or prevent bugs where anyone can login as root, or write a calculator app that works correctly).
So yeah, go give Budgie a try. It probably sucks. But you might find that it sucks in ways that are tolerable!
While I largely prefer using macOS, the way that Windows 10 handles desktops is much better in my opinion. I can't understand why macOS does not let you display your menu bar on all displays if you don't have "separate spaces" enabled. It seems so strange to me that throughout the entire development process no one thought it was kind of ridiculous that the user would not be able to access the menu bar of an application from the same screen the application is on.
That said, I basically cross my fingers now every time I win+tab in Windows 10 because about 10-15% of the time the entire UI locks and I just have to wait 1-2 minutes before I can use my machine again.
So yea, "sucking in ways that are tolerable"!