Budgie LogoBuddies of Budgie

Est. January 1, 2022

Buddies of Budgie

An independent organization dedicated to the development of Budgie Desktop and fostering a welcoming, diverse community.

Our Mission

We believe in creating software that is simple, elegant, and accessible to all users. We build Budgie not just as a desktop, but as a foundation; serving everyday users with an approachable experience while enabling developers to experiment with new ways of interacting with computing devices.

Best Buds

The core leadership team guiding the direction of the organization and the Budgie Desktop project.

JS

Joshua Strobl

Founder & Lead

Founder / Lead of Buddies of Budgie. Fedora Budgie Spin maintainer.

DM

David Mohammed

Core Contributor

Ubuntu Budgie project founder/lead & Debian 'all-things-budgie' maintainer.

EM

Evan Maddock

Core Contributor

Sci-fi and tech nerd who enjoys programming, woodworking, cooking, and other miscellaneous stuff. Not necessarily in that order.

NG

Neal Gompa

Core Contributor

Developer and contributor in Fedora, openSUSE, AlmaLinux, and CentOS, focusing primarily on the base Linux system components and the Linux desktop. A big believer in "upstream first", which has led him all over the open source world.

Distribution / Packaging

The Distribution and Packaging team ensures Budgie Desktop is available and well-integrated across various Linux distributions.

JS

Joshua Strobl

Fedora

CJ

Campbell Jones

Arch Linux

DM

David Mohammed

Debian / Ubuntu

EM

Evan Maddock

Solus

Core Values

01

Independence

All organizations and projects are equal stakeholders in the future of Budgie Desktop. No singular for-profit or non-profit entity has sole influence over our direction. Budgie is viewed as a platform that encourages distributions to ship it in a manner that best satisfies their user base.

02

Transparency

Transparency has been central to how we function from the start. We strive for proactive communication on plans for the organization and projects, fostering public discussions through our Matrix Space and Forgejo. More information enables smarter decision-making.

03

User-centric

Buddies of Budgie and Budgie Desktop is built for its users. Users are stakeholders in development and operations. Our consensus model ensures decisions positively impact the end user experience. People should feel encouraged to get involved directly.

Getting Involved

Buddies of Budgie is first and foremost a diverse community, with people of all different skill sets and origins, that come together to contribute to and promote open source software.

The best place to start getting involved is our Matrix Space.

What is Matrix?

Matrix is an open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralised, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed reference implementations.

You can access Matrix Spaces with clients such as Element.

Code Contributions

Buddies of Budgie software is open source and primarily written in either C or Vala (Budgie 10) and C++/QML (Budgie 11).

  • Budgie 10: Development continues on GitHub
  • Budgie 11: Development happens on Forgejo

Documentation

There is always room for improvement for documentation around Budgie Desktop and our organization. Visit our documentation site to learn how to contribute.

Translations

Making software accessible to users around the world, in their native language, is incredibly important to the success of our project. To facilitate translations, Buddies of Budgie uses the Transifex platform.

Work In Progress

Translation support for our documentation (documents and user elements) is a work in progress. Keep an eye on our blog or our Mastodon for news on when documentation translations support is introduced!

Funding & Support

Buddies of Budgie is a volunteer-driven organization. We accept donations through OpenCollective to support infrastructure costs, development tools, and other organizational needs.

Your support helps us maintain CI/CD infrastructure, domain registrations, and potentially compensate contributors for significant work.

Support us on OpenCollective