Long time lurker, had to create an account to post about this though. Hey folks!
"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"
I am sorry about the inaccurate statements made, they have been fixed according to your points.
Many thanks to the Budgie and Solus team for the great desktop experience!
Thank you for fixing the items raised, much appreciated! Regardless of what operating system you use Budgie under, glad you are enjoying the desktop experience :)
I haven't followed budgie in a couple of years, but the last I understood about it, it might not be technically accurate to say it's based on GNOME *Shell*, but it's absolutely based on GNOME, the desktop stack. Just to clarify your clarification. :)
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(?).
"but it's absolutely based on GNOME, the desktop stack. Just to clarify your clarification. :)"
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.
>> 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.
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.
Do I understand from a quick Google that you don't support Wayland (or at least Solus doesn't)? If you're using mutter you should presumably have the core of the capability available I believe?
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.
"Do I understand from a quick Google that you don't support Wayland (or at least Solus doesn't)? If you're using mutter you should presumably have the core of the capability available I believe?"
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.
There are numerous serious usability issues with the XEmbed tray icons [0], even if you stay on X11 you will eventually want to switch over to the StatusNotifier API [1]. This is supported by KDE, Ubuntu's Appindicator, and I believe XFCE now too. Thanks for your hard work in Budgie BTW.
Hey, this is great insight!
I've been thinking about trying solus, and one thing that's great is that it seems to support flatpaks well.
Do you think that these types of universal packages will have a large impact on less well known distributions being adopted more in the future as the need to have everything users want packaged for it is reduced significantly?
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.
Just in case someone's looking for that macOS look and feel with the stability of the Linux Mint Cinnamon [1] desktop environment, here's how - https://youtu.be/DMs7DX3Um9E
That is from 2018, and at that time I used deepin daily. However, since moving from their compositor to kwin, things started going off rails. I was on and off on their github pages posting and commenting on issues and what I learned is that at that time they had been pushing for solving technical debt in their codebase. But the system overall became so unstable that I was left with a choice of not updating my arch rolling install often or moving to another de.
I chose the latter, moved to KDE and never had any issues anymore. No weird hack to make WiFi work, no update breaking the compositor making me have to hop between compositors.
I mean, that was 2018, things might have stabilized a little. But a year ago a friend of mine, long time fan of deepin moved to KDE too because of these same stability issues.
By all means try it out. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Like many I needed to replace a very old MBP recently, and wasn't enthusiastic about paying top dollar for developer nag screens and recompiling stuff for a custom processor. I decided to once again try laptop Ubuntu, with an Asus Zephyrus. It's actually working great. Even battery life is good and I have a cuda capable graphics card. I think it's finally the year of desktop Linux ;)
I really like Solus and Budgie, but last time I tried it enough things were broken (ex: switching workspaces via keyboard shortcuts) that I moved on. I currently dual boot Pop and Elementary. I particularly like Elementary’s terminal and their picture in picture feature. But elementary is getting long in the tooth.
Case in point. Pop really is the pinnacle of GNOME Ubuntu derivatives IMO, I've run it for years.
And if it wasn't for the 18.04 base of Elementary, Budgie would've slipped under my radar completely.
Agreed. Pop is the distro to beat for daily use for me at least. I've been using Linux as a daily driver since 1998 and until Pop, the only thing I felt comfortable with was Window Maker.
I haven't tried Budgie yet. I really like Elementary - a lovely design consistently implemented. Unfortunately (like you said for Budgie), I found it buggy enough that I eventually went back to standard Ubuntu. Might give it another try in a few years.
that's really interesting. I used to have this problem all the time but I just realized that I haven't really seen the problem on my device in at least a year or so.
I dont like Gnome's defaults. I have the standard GNOME 2 was better mindset. Honestly its the giant app switcher thingy that comes up when you press Super. I just cant stand that. But I wanted the "it just works" aspect of Ubuntu, so I looked around and went with Ubuntu Budgie. I would have gone full solus, but I needed to run Unity3D so I stuck with Ubuntu. I think Budgie is the best looking DE for my tastes. Most things worked great, but I did have a few random problems. I had a bug in Plank where new apps wouldnt show up on it. I gave up on fixing it and switched to Linux Mint. Mint's Cinnamon and Budgie are pretty similar, and Mint just had a few more years of maturity under its belt.
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.
Agreed. Most DEs are well designed and work well enough. I just don't like busy UIs. I am now on Gnome on Pop!_OS because the latest Gnome, at least on Pop, seems to stay out of my way. On Fedora or other, there are so many errors that constantly present themselves. Window Maker is what I used for years until I discovered Pop. I may yet install WM on top of Pop.
I'm pondering installing a graphic interface on my home NAS-like Manjaro server so I can just watch my movies and shows directly through it.
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 can't really speak to any sort of timeout, but I have since reduced animation timings and tied the "disable animations" option into workspace switching as well (so there is zero transition in it, should you disable animations).
This is surprising to hear. I only tried Budgie recently but I found it more responsive and reliable than previous window managers (xfce, mate). This includes workplace switching which I use extensively.
I've seen the old Budgie too, it really wasn't good back then. Now it's more or less bug-free, alhough, I personally don't use multiple workspaces, so can't comment on that.
My setup is a USB-C hub + switch that toggles my monitor/keyboard/mouse/headphones/webcam between my work (MBP) and personal (homemade frankenstein) machines.
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).
A couple of people are here mentioning bugs they've encountered, etc. So I'm responding with them in mind (not necessarily arguing with or against them).
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!
I alternate between a Razer 15 and a MacBook Pro that I plug into a 3 display setup and this is one of the things that is very aggravating / comically short-sighted about macOS with multiple displays.
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.
I’ve been using the Ubuntu Budgie for a few months now to replace an ancient MBP and it’s been great. Some minor bugs, but nothing like what others are mentioning (switching between workspace works fine, and is fast)
"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.