Buddies of Budgie was founded to provide a home for the Budgie Desktop, an open source modern desktop environment built to provide you immediate access to the things you need.

Independence is a crucial value to how we operate as an organization. All organizations and projects are equal stakeholders in the future of the organization and most importantly, the future of the Budgie Desktop platform. No singular for-profit or non-profit entity has the sole influence over our direction.

Transparency has been central to how we function from the start. We want to ensure that everyone is able to understand how the organization and Budgie itself works currently and the intended direction going into the future.

Buddies of Budgie and the Budgie desktop itself is built for its users. Users are seen as stakeholders in development and day-to-day operations, with a fundamental part of our consensus model for making changes to the organization and our platform being how do our decisions positively impact the end user’s experience.
People should feel encouraged to get involved directly, promoting fairness in our ways of working.

Budgie 10 is our current “major” release of Budgie Desktop. This major release consists of “minor” series releases that have a mix of new features, bug fixes, and architectural improvements. Although Budgie Desktop 10 is not “based” on any other desktop experience, it is built on top of many libraries and projects from the GNOME Foundation, such as the GTK 3.x graphical toolkit, Mutter window manager, GNOME Settings Daemon, and more.

Budgie is built by the community, with volunteers from around the world, all contributing to make Budgie a better experience for everyone! Whether it is design work, software engineering, or translations, it is this community that makes it happen.

Budgie is available on a wide variety of operating systems, from Arch Linux to Ubuntu, and everything in between. Try it out today on the flavor of Linux of your choosing.

With our Budgie Desktop Settings application, you can make Budgie feel like home. Whether you want a dock or multiple panels, you can do it with just a few clicks.

Budgie Menu shows you all your installed applications, neatly organized into categories to improve discoverability, and with lightning fast application searching! No more diving into sub-menus to find the app you need.

Raven is an all-in-one center for accessing your calendar, controlling sound output and input (including per-app volume control), media playback and more.

Raven also enables you to access missed notifications, with the ability to clear away individual notifications, grouped notifications, and all notifications.

This page contains our roadmap and current state of the various areas of our organization, technical or otherwise.
Our roadmap will evolve alongside our organization, community, and software. This page is partially generated based on information from our Github.


Budgie 10.8 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring improvements to Budgie Menu, adoption of StatusNotifier support in System Tray, Magpie v0.x support, and more!

## Budgie Trash Applet

![](/images/blog/2023/08/budgie-10.8/trash-applet.jpg)

The previously third-party Budgie Trash Applet, developed by Buddies of Budgie team member Evan Maddock, has been merged into mainline Budgie Desktop to become a part of the default applets available to users out-of-the-box. This trash applet enables the user to quickly access and empty the contents of their trashcan as well as restore files.

## Magpie v0.x Support

Budgie 10.8 is the first release which includes support for our Magpie ABI. To quickly summarize for those that did not catch our blog post on planned [Wayland support](/blog/wayland) and may not be familiar with Magpie, as well as to offer a bit of a history lesson, we will quickly go over the important parts.

Historically, Budgie Desktop has used GNOME's [Mutter](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter) window manager (nowadays Mutter is also a Wayland compositor) to do the heavy lifting for `budgie-wm`. budgie-wm has served as a small layer on top of Mutter, handling select keybindings for Budgie-specific functionality, input management, animations, screenshot management, backgrounds, and so forth. With every GNOME Stack release, Mutter ABI would change and Budgie Desktop would need to be updated to support the latest ABI and typically two or three ABIs prior so those on older GNOME stacks could still get newer Budgie Desktop releases. On many occasions, this resulted in significant pressure on the team as late ABI changes would land and we would need to work quickly to adapt to them.

As GNOME has pursued improvements around their Wayland support, this has understandably at times resulted in regressions in its support for X11. As Budgie Desktop currently uses X11, this has created a less optimal user experience for our users. This reached a turning point with GNOME 44 / mutter-12 ABI when there was a larger split between Wayland and X11 support in Mutter, resulting in many regressions in its X11 support that to this day remain unresolved.

During our team discussions, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to address this in two manners:

1. Restore X11 support / functionality expected by our users for the immediate future.
2. Prioritize adoption of Wayland, a longer-term goal, by developing a wlroots-based compositor that would serve as our window manager for both future Budgie 10.x releases when we go Wayland-only, as well as Budgie 11.

To accomplish these goals, we first decided to soft-fork Mutter at the state it was in for GNOME 43, eliminating the regressions introduced in GNOME 44 / mutter-12. This version of Magpie is < 1.0 (e.g. 0.9.x) and is designed to be a temporary fork catered to Budgie and its current X11-only support. Alongside this effort, we are building "Magpie 1.0" as the wlroots-based Wayland compositor, with the plan to **fully drop X11 support once Magpie 1.0 is ready for consumption**.

In the case of Budgie 10.8, this series [supports magpie-0 ABI](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/387), which is effectively identical to the mutter-12 ABI. This provides us a stable ABI that can be leveraged across multiple GNOME Stack releases until Magpie 1.0 is released. Magpie v0.x should be used for GNOME 44+ and we will not be pursuing support for newer mutter ABIs, such as mutter-13 ABI for GNOME 45, as this would not be the most optimal use of our engineering bandwidth over development efforts around Wayland and Budgie 11.

## Privilege Escalation Dialog Improvements

![](/images/blog/2023/08/budgie-10.8/polkit.jpg)

Wonder what is prompting that PolicyKit authentication dialog? Wonder no longer! In this release of Budgie Desktop, our polkit dialog will now show the action description and action ID when graphical privilege escalation is requested.

Alongside this change, we made sure the dialog could no longer be resized.

## Performance / Power Modes In Battery Status Applet

![](/images/blog/2023/08/budgie-10.8/performance-mode-selector.jpg)

Budgie's battery indicator in the Status applet now provides the ability to control the Performance / Power profile modes offered by [power-profiles-daemon](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/power-profiles-daemon?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). When available on a supported system, you will get access to various options such as:

- Balanced
- Power Saver
- Performance

## System Tray Adopts Status Notifier Specification

![](/images/blog/2023/08/budgie-10.8/system-tray.jpg)

The System Tray applet has been overhauled for Budgie 10.8. As we elaborated on in our [Wayland](/blog/wayland) blog post, historically we have used either `na-tray` or the XEmbed Protocol for the creation, management, and rendering of trays icons. This had notable downsides, such as:

- Icons not scaling with panel size
- High DPI scaling relied on the application providing the icon to support DPI scaling
- Inconsistent styling of tray menus
- Relies on X11 APIs, which is not viable for our Wayland-only future

For Budgie 10.8, our System Tray has adopted the [Status Notifier](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierItem/) specification. This is a modern, vendor-agnostic solution that enables applications to communicate all relevant information for the rendering of their tray icon over DBus rather than being responsible for drawing tray icons and menus themselves, promoting the development of catered solutions by desktop environments and those developing panels for user experiences such as tiling window managers.

The result of this on the Budgie Desktop side is that we can draw all menus and items in a manner that is visually consistent. Going into Budgie 11, we will have a similar solution and paired with multiple panels across multiple monitors (a requirement for Budgie 11), you will even be able to have multiple tray applet instances enabled, which was not otherwise possible with the XEmbed-based solutions.

## General Improvements

Budgie 10.8 features a bunch of smaller improvements, complementing our major new features and changes.

### Budgie Menu

Our Application Indexer's fuzzy scoring function [has been ported to C](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/385). When transpiling to C, Vala would mangle this function, causing it to crash randomly on non-Latin text. Porting it to C fixed the crashing issue while still producing the desired search results.

For Budgie Menu, we [made changes](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/388) to the organization of some applications based on user feedback. Applications that previously were put into the Other category ended up fitting better in other existing categories and some application exclusions no longer making sense either. The Utilities category has been removed entirely, as we found it had considerable overlap with the System Tools category and it was not immediately clear what the difference was between Accessories and Utilities. Now, applications previously in Utilities can be found in the System Tools category.

### Internal Theme Refinements

We have made some small refinements and recoloring to our internal theme. Historically, the primary accent color in our internal theme mirrored that of the Solus blue. When Budgie Desktop development began under Buddies of Budgie, the decision was made early on to move to our adopted light green primary color. This was chosen to be more like greenery and common (green) budgerigars. The first to be updated was the Budgie logo itself and the color has finally made its way to our default internal theme as well.

Alongside this change, we have darkened some elements such as Budgie Menu, the panel, and Raven's background. Raven widgets, text, and iconography should contrast better against the darker background as a result!

### Other Small Things

- Kvantum and Murrine themes are now hidden in Budgie Desktop Settings [#393](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/393)
- power-dialog: We have removed style class changes and made it behave more like polkit dialog. This fixes the case where themes which do not style the dialog end up having a transparent background, making it very hard to see and use the dialog [#381](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/381)
- We now search for plugins in both /usr and /usr/local [#404](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/404)
- We have moved the battery label setting to Budgie Desktop Settings as well as moved the percentage label from left of icon to right [#389](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/389)

## Bug Fixes

It would not be a Budgie release without some bug squashing. In this release, we have:

- Enabled ellipsize for Style boxes in BDS [#403](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/403)
- Fixed Icon Tasklist not showing Private Internet Access [#379](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/379)
- Fixed Polkit dialog resizing
- Prevented notifications and screenshot from locking up when sink is locked
- keyboard-layout: Don't try to initialize IBus [#418](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/418)
  - IBus already gets initialized in wm, and calling that function here causes severe breakage, leading to budgie-panel being repeatedly killed for OOM.

## Code Cleanup & Improvements

While working on bug squashing and new features, we did not forget to go back and clean up some legacy cruft!

- We now use is_empty() instead of length checks on collections [#407](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/407)
- vapi: We have dropped all Vapi files that are included with Vala
- We now look for dart-sass or ruby-sass before sassc
- Adopted ngettext for plural strings [#400](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/400)

---

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [BlindRepublic](https://github.com/BlindRepublic?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Evan Maddock](https://github.com/EbonJaeger?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [justchen1369](https://github.com/justchen1369?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [khagaroth](https://github.com/khagaroth?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.8 Released


Budgie Desktop has improved by leaps and bounds since founding Buddies of Budgie in January 2022. We have taken Budgie Desktop through two significant "10 series" releases, which have delivered the following to our users:

1.  Rewrites and re-architectures of core parts of Budgie Desktop such as our notification system, notification grouping, Budgie Daemon, a new Application Indexer, and more.
2.  New features and improvements around Budgie Menu, new Power Dialog, new Budgie Screenshot, and Raven widgets.
3.  New Raven API for extensibility of Raven
4.  Numerous bug fixes, some of which were around for years.

Throughout these development efforts across 2022 and 2023, we have been continuously evaluating the Linux ecosystem and desktop space, as well as our goals for Budgie 10.x and 11. We have been excited to see the maturing of Wayland protocols, Wayland compositors, as well as the broadening support by vendors such as NVIDIA on Wayland adoption (e.g. finally supporting GBM).

In our [State of the Budgie blog post in May of last year](state-of-the-budgie-may-2022/), we emphasized that Budgie 11 would be Wayland-first, with initial expectations being that we would support an X11 fallback mode, as well as mentioning that "it is not **entirely** out of the realm of possibility to have a Budgie 10 under Wayland".

Since that blog post, several key developments have occurred in the Wayland ecosystem.

### Plasma

While it is likely that Plasma will continue to have X11 support for the foreseeable future, their plan is to [default to Wayland in Plasma 6](https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2188?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org#note_676355). Meanwhile, it is proposed that Fedora KDE and Kinoite will focus entirely on the Wayland session. Neal Gompa from Fedora [cites](https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/347?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) the following reasons:

> Three reasons for this removal:
>
> - Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 and will be dropped in "a future major RHEL release".
> - Graphics fallback modes are Wayland-friendly now with SimpleDRM enabled since F36.
> - NVIDIA drivers (since v495~v515) support GBM for Wayland instead of EGLStreams. Wayland is fully supported on current NVIDIA drivers.
>
> This will drastically reduce our support burden and give us the ability to focus on quality for the KDE Plasma stack and continue our feature-forward nature.

### RHEL 9 and beyond

X.org Server has been [deprecated](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/9.0_release_notes/deprecated_functionality?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org#JIRA-RHELPLAN-121048) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since 9.0 in May of last year. As shown in the image below, Red Hat has a full support and maintenance support cycle for these releases which lasts a total of 10 years.

![](/images/blog/2023/07/image.png)

Understandably it does not make financial sense for Red Hat to continue investing engineering resources into maintenance of X11 support, when Wayland support is likely already in a sufficient position for many Red Hat customers, and when Red Hat is almost certainly under market pressures that would encourage divesting in X11 and re-allocating those engineering resources.

### Mutter

Wayland support under Mutter, the window manager / Wayland compositor developed by GNOME, has continued to evolve and improve.

For GNOME 44, Mutter split their X11 implementation into a separate client to facilitate their goal of eliminating their dependency on GTK3 and simplifying future work on rendering with GTK4. Unfortunately, this work has introduced some notable side effects for X11 session support, for example:

- [broken server-side decoration theming](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2179566&ref=blog.buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [application grouping regressions](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2800?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [windows position regressions](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2787?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

While we admire the work GNOME has done on their Wayland support, this has unfortunately impacted the desktop experience for our users, as currently Budgie 10 relies on Mutter's X11 support.

## Magpie

As we look to address immediate user needs as well as our goals for Budgie 11, we have decided to take a proactive approach in making Wayland support a reality within Budgie 10 series.

To restore functionality expected by our users for the immediate future, we have decided to soft-fork Mutter at the state it was in for GNOME 43. This will resolve some issues that cropped up as a result of the X11 work done for GNOME 44. We want to strongly emphasize that this is a temporary fork of Mutter that is designed to be strictly consumed by Budgie Desktop with X11, and we will be keeping the versioning to < 1.0 to accurately reflect that.

This work has been spearheaded by David Mohammed from the [Ubuntu Budgie](https://ubuntubudgie.org/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) team, within the Buddies of Budgie organization, and is expected to be adopted by all partners and distributors of Budgie Desktop when it's deemed ready for consumption. As a call-to-action, if you are an avid Budgie Desktop user with some technical skills and would like to get your hands dirty testing this soft-fork, take a look at [our documentation](https://docs.buddiesofbudgie.org/developer/lab/magpie?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) and provide feedback!

Taking a longer term view, yet still within the scope of our desired Budgie 10 series changes reflecting the evolving landscape of the Linux desktop, we will implement a replacement Wayland compositor that is built on top of [wlroots](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), which will see its first stable release as "Magpie 1.0"

<Alert icon={false} severity="error">
  **At such point in time as Magpie 1.0 is released, Budgie 10 will no longer support X11. Budgie 11 will not support
  X11.**
</Alert>

wlroots was an obvious choice for us as it is the most vendor-neutral compositing library and really lives up to its marketing of "_about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway_". While Mutter's excellent Wayland compositor could be viewed as sufficient for the short-term of Budgie 10 series, Budgie 11 will result in a separation from the GNOME stack, and therefore to avoid duplicate effort or further complicating our existing soft fork, we decided to immediately invest time into building a compositor leveraging wlroots.

### Development Efforts Towards Wayland

A considerable set of Budgie Desktop features and functionality has historically relied on X11, whether that be through the toolkit used in Budgie 10 (Gtk3), libraries such as Wnck, or Mutter and its support for [Extended Window Manager Hints](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). This has been used for our application grouping / state tracking built on top of Wnck, system tray support historically using the [XEmbed Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/xembed-spec/xembed-spec-latest.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), focus capturing for Raven, panel intersection for auto-hiding behavior, and more – not to mention all the functionality hidden behind Mutter that Budgie has not historically needed to be concerned of.

So while the efforts described below do not encompass all the work required to move to Wayland, they do push us in the right direction towards this Wayland-only future. You will see these efforts across several Budgie 10.x series releases, as we incrementally work towards supporting Wayland.

#### System Tray

While the system tray has been a foregone conclusion in some other desktop environments, we recognize the value it provides to our users, whether they rely on it to communicate the state of an application (e.g. unread messages in a messenger, sync tools) or get quick access to functionality (Steam, OBS Studio, flameshot).

A move away from XEmbed has been a long time coming, with alternative standards / implementations such as Ubuntu's AppIndicator and [Status Notifier](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierItem/) being around for a number of years. Up until Budgie 10.5.2 in December of 2020, we had been using an \`na-tray\` implementation also seen in desktop environments such as Cinnamon for the creation and management of system tray icons. In Budgie 10.5.2, this was replaced our own "carbon tray" implementation, still leveraging the XEmbed Protocol, to tackle numerous issues such as background icons not refreshing and oddities with inconsistent hiding.

Fundamentally though, this was still using XEmbed Protocol, since the goal was scoped at the time to fixing specific issues. As these embeds are X11 windows, they still have downsides.

Exhibit A: Icons don't scale with panel size

![](/images/blog/2023/06/bigpanel.png)

Exhibit B: Scaling with high DPI relies on the application supporting DPI scaling

![](/images/blog/2023/06/hidpi.png)

Exhibit C: Menus are drawn by the application, meaning the styling will be inconsistent as it is dependent on the application and their theming choices.

![](/images/blog/2023/06/menu-nonsense.png)

During our discussions in May of last year when we were planning our initial scope for Budgie 10 series, when it should be considered as no longer being under development, development of Budgie 11, and more – we decided that a new System Tray applet leveraging the Status Notifier specification was something we absolutely needed to do. Not only does it move Budgie Desktop in the right direction with the adoption of **modern** vendor-agnostic standards, but was a requirement for the eventuality of moving to Wayland (whether that be within Budgie 10 or at the latest in Budgie 11).

For Budgie 10.8, we will be shipping our Status Notifier-based system tray, which will address the above mentioned items (visual inconsistencies, X11 requirement, non-modern standard). This implementation additionally encompasses Ayatana and AppIndicator tray items! Unlike the XEMBED protocol, applications / toolkits / frameworks which support StatusNotifier send the information for their tray icon over DBus to the respective StatusNotifierHost for the implementer of the host to consume, rather than being responsible for the drawing themselves. The result of this on the Budgie Desktop side is that we can (leveraging a custom implementation of the DBusMenu protocol) draw all menus and items in a manner that is visually consistent.

![](/images/blog/2023/06/hidpi-new.png)

HiDPI scaling consistency. Unfortunately Discord does not provide a scalable icon.

![](/images/blog/2023/06/menu-nonsense-new.png)

Menu visual consistency

We have been dogfooding this implementation via our main branch for a while and even though there is still some oddities from Electron applications, overall the experience is greatly improved. Going into Budgie 11, we will have a similar solution and paired with multiple panels across multiple monitors (a requirement for Budgie 11), you will even be able to have multiple tray applet instances enabled, which was not otherwise possible with the XEmbed-based solutions.

### wlroots Learnings

Campbell (serebit) is learning about the inner workings of wlroots as well as various Wayland protocols in his own research project called [flyaway](https://gitlab.com/serebit/flyaway?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), with lessons learned being applied to the development of "Magpie 1.0".

Here is an excerpt from his blog post:

> Wayland is what happens when issues with the dominant windowing protocol have been festering for decades. It throws away everything and establishes a core set of standards that must be adhered to, along with a (very large) set of extensions that can be optionally implemented. The website [https://wayland.app/](https://wayland.app/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) shows all the protocols worth knowing, and a lot more on top of that. It’s kinda like Vulkan, in a sense: the core has the basics, and everything else is extensions that can be queried for by clients.

> Wlroots is a library that writes all the code that I didn’t want to have to write, because it has too much math. It’s a generally unopinionated framework for building your own Wayland compositor that, while not perfect, does most of the heavy lifting for you. In writing Flyaway, most of the work so far has been figuring out how to put together the pieces that wlroots has given me; piping and such. Sadly, the documentation kinda sucks, but examples are plenty (e.g. sway and clay) and the developers have been very accessible and helpful when I’ve had questions.

> Right now, I’m focused on implementing the XDG shell protocol that has all the desktop windowing functionality you expect, like maximizing/minimizing/tiling, and the wlroots-spearheaded wlr-layer-shell protocol for KDE/Budgie style panels and docks. The former is a must-have, and the latter is what I have determined is the best way for Budgie’s panel system to be ported to Wayland. The below is a small demonstration of what I’ve accomplished so far with wlr-layer-shell, using the gtk-layer-shell example binary.

<iframe
  src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7HkvKeRf3xQ?feature=oembed"
  frameBorder="0"
  allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
  allowFullScreen=""
  title="Campbell Flyaway Demo"
></iframe>

[![would-you-like-to-learn-more-1](/images/blog/2023/06/would-you-like-to-learn-more.jpg)](https://serebit.com/posts/wayland-is-pretty-good/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

**If you would like to learn more, you can [read about it here](https://serebit.com/posts/wayland-is-pretty-good/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org).**

### libxfce4windowing: Adopting a Wayland-compatible abstraction for windowing concepts

Evan (EbonJaeger) is actively incorporating [libxfce4windowing](https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4windowing?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) as an effective drop-in replacement for our use of libwnck, which will eliminate a direct dependency on a library built for X11 and replace it with a solution that supports both Wayland and X11.

He wrote about his experience below:

> One of the aspects of Budgie that we have to change in moving to Wayland is how open windows are tracked, needed primarily for the tasklist applets, but also for notification pausing and the night light feature. This is all handled by a module affectionately named Abomination, using the Wnck API. That won’t work for Wayland, so we need a solution. Enter libxfce4windowing, a library created by the folks at XFCE for their window tracking, which supports both X11 and Wayland. Leveraging this in Budgie allows us to much more quickly implement Wayland support, while also hopefully giving an idea of how to do this ourselves for Budgie 11, if needed.

> Having not had much, if any, experience with the Wnck API and Abomination before, or really any experience with tracking windows, I needed a place to start fresh. Luckily, a new Simple Tasklist applet was already in early stages of development, providing a perfect place to learn how to use libxfce4windowing! So, that’s where I started: porting Simple Tasklist from Wnck to XFCE’s windowing library. And it was… easy. Once I learned that any currently open windows are added via signals \*after\* initialization instead of being ready immediately, it Just Worked ™. The API is very similar to that provided by Wnck, which makes translating between the two much easier. This might be because they use Wnck under the hood for the X11 implementation.

> One thing I discovered that was a source of annoyance at first was the lack of a \`Screen.get_active_workspace()\` method like Wnck provides. Instead, you have to get the WorkspaceManager from the Screen, then get all the WorkspaceGroups, and then find the group that actually has your workspaces in it. Luckily for X11, there is only one group. It turns out that this is all because Wayland has a concept of workspace groups, which X11, or at least Wnck, does not. That makes me feel better about having to write 6 or 7 lines of code just to get the current Workspace.

> With a solid foundation for Simple Tasklist, I then turned my attention to tackling Abomination and Icon Tasklist. My goal is to come up with an API similar to Abomination, but leveraging libxfce4windowing, and simplifying its operation. Abomination does some things with window class renaming and other logic and edge-casing to determine if a window belongs to the same application as other open windows. I am hoping to be able to do away with all of that, given all the problems it has caused us in the past. XFCE’s windowing library groups windows by class group, which is what we currently do in Abomination.

> This part of the journey is still very much a work in progress, and there is a lot of reworking still to do. Every step brings us closer to being Wayland-ready, and that makes it all worth it. Big shout out to the folks at XFCE for writing a great cross-windowing-system library; it has been really easy to use!

## In Summary

We still have a long road ahead of us in supporting Wayland, with lots of use cases that we will need to tackle and user requirements that need to be met. I know I can speak for the team when I say we are all incredibly excited at the prospect of Budgie Desktop on Wayland _finally_ being realized, and sharing with all of you our: experimentation towards Magpie 1.0, research projects, and various parts of the porting of Budgie Desktop itself!

So keep a close eye on our [GitHub](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), blog and our [Mastodon](https://floss.social/@BuddiesOfBudgie?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) for more info!

<OCCallout />


Wayland.


[Budgie 10.7.2](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.7.2?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is the second minor release in the 10.7 series of our Budgie Desktop environment, primarily focused on bug fixes, additional compatibility with GNOME 44 stack, and various quality-of-life improvements.

## GNOME 44 Support

While Budgie 10.7.1 introduced initial support for GNOME 44 through our Mutter 12 ABI support, Budgie 10.7.2 expands on it with additional changes centered around three key areas:

1.  Workarounds for functionality broken as a result of changes upstream in Mutter with regards to X11 support.
2.  Updates to support changes in tooling we use for out-of-process dialogs / prompts, primarily via zenity.
3.  Backporting of functionality from our work-in-progress 10.8 that resolves some crashes seen as a result of changes in Vala.

In the first area, we have updated our screenshot area selector to be now explicitly call for no decorations, to prevent the selection overlay from showing decorators, resulting in a non-fullscreen overlay.

In the second area, upstream [zenity](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/zenity?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) was rewritten to use GTK4 and libadwaita. In the process of this change the command-line flags were changed (with some removals), resulting in some dialogs no longer appearing, such as those to handle confirmation of display changes when applied in Budgie Control Center. We now support both the "old" zenity (pre-3.90) and new (3.90+), and compile-time we will now bake in the appropriate options.

In the third area, we noticed a spike in reported segfaults / abrts in Budgie Desktop recently related to functionality in our AppIndexer. This functionality was used to calculate the Levenshtein Distance of your search queries in our Budgie Menu and Budgie Run Dialog. In _normal human language_, we had implemented a common string metric that was used to determine the difference between what you are searching and various metadata, such as the name, of an application. This difference was used as part of the scoring of the app based on your query and helped to sort them in a manner that was most relevant, such as making sure "fir" actually scored "**fir**efox" better than something like "**fer**dium". This was implemented using a matrix of numbers. Changes in the generated C in a newer version of Vala resulted in it being improperly freed, [causing segfaults](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2189356&ref=blog.buddiesofbudgie.org) when opening and searching in either Budgie Menu or Budgie Run Dialog. Yikes.

Fortunately, we [already had a change for Budgie 10.8](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/318?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) that changed us from using Levenstein Distance to Fuzzy Bitap, resulting in better matches with the neat side-effect of no longer having bad C generated by Vala causing crashes! So instead of going down the rabbit hole even further to see where it went, we just decided to bring you that improvement early!

## Optimizations around Notifications

Budgie 10.7.2 introduces optimizations around Notifications in Raven.

Due to [known scalability problems in GtkListBox and Co in GTK3](https://blog.gtk.org/2020/06/07/scalable-lists-in-gtk-4/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), Raven could begin to feel sluggish or less responsive when a large amount of notifications had been accrued in its Notifications view. This was typically seen around the 800 notifications mark. To address this sluggishness, we have implement a global cap on the amount of notifications in Raven, with older notifications in each Notification Group being gradually culled as you hit the cap and more notifications come in.

This global cap is set to 500 and is divided equally among all the Notification Groups (per app). So if you just had Discord firing away but nothing else, it would start culling Discord notifications once you hit that 500 mark. Once you add another group to it, it'd halve to 250, 3 to 166ish, 4 to 125, and so on. As you remove Notification Groups or clean up notifications, the caps automatically balance out.

This should help to address long-term sluggishness typically seen on high uptime systems or those where the end user may not have as strongly implemented their own filters for disabling specific application notifications. We have also optimized notification destruction to tackle growing memory consumption.

## Other Fixes & Improvements

Alongside the improvements / fixes above, we have backported the following for 10.7.x:

- Fix Gtk gdk_x11_window_get_frame_extents, tackling some scaling issues with popovers.
- Ensure Budgie Menu application lists height allocation accounts for GTK scaling factor. This ensures all parts of Budgie Menu are visible when used on resolutions such as 1080p with 200% scaling, rather than parts of it being cut off.
- Use correct C header for meta_keybindings_set_custom_handler. This is necessary to avoid a build failure with future compilers which do not accept implicit function declarations by default.
- budgie-menu: Change the selection policy from NONE to SINGLE. When set to NONE, keyboard navigation works, but there is no visual indicator. Changing it to SINGLE allows themes to show a visual indication that an item is selected, and that the arrow keys on the keyboard changes the selection.
- budgie-menu: Make category buttons keyboard navigable

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the code contributors that made this release possible:

- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [David Mohammed](https://github.com/fossfreedom?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Florian Weimer](https://github.com/fweimer-rh?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Evan Maddock](https://github.com/EbonJaeger?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Jacob Vlijm](https://github.com/Jacob-Vlijm?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.7.2 Released


[Budgie 10.7.1](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.7.1?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is the first minor release in the 10.7 series of our Budgie Desktop environment, introducing some improvements, bug fixes, and updated translations.

## Improvements

![](/images/blog/2023/02/BudgieDesktopSettings_EnableUndirection.jpg)

- Our settings / functionality for toggling unredirection has been improved. Unredirection allows frames to bypass the compositor for fullscreen applications, reducing overhead and improving performance in scenarios such as gaming. In previous releases, the option would be for _disabling_ unredirection with the setting being _off_ by default, meaning unredirection was enabled. This was confusing for both end users as well as in the implementation of the functionality. This setting has now been updated to be `Enable unredirection`, with the option _enabled_ by default, with clearer explanation for the end user. [#300](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/300?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Initial Mutter 12 ABI support has been added in preparation for the upcoming GNOME 44 release. [#305](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/305?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Margins have been refined in the Budgie Desktop Settings panel settings layout to be aligned with that of the settings layout for Raven settings. [#295](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/295?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Updated translations. Thank you to all of our amazing translators on our [Transifex](https://www.transifex.com/buddiesofbudgie/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) ❤️

## Bug Fixes

- Fix inability to capture full-screen applications with Budgie Screenshot. [#298](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/298?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Fix missing translatable strings in Budgie Screenshot. [#299](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/299?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Fix ellipsizing overflowing text in media control widget header resulting in Raven expansion. [#302](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/302?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Fix Budgie Menu handling of partial application name sorting and searching. [#284](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/284?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) / [#291](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/291?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Fix plugins with ampersands (&) in description failing to render correctly. [#292](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/292?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) / [#293](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/292?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the code contributors that made this release possible:

- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [David Mohammed](https://github.com/fossfreedom?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Eli Schwartz](https://github.com/eli-schwartz?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Evan Maddock](https://github.com/EbonJaeger?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.7.1 Released


Budgie 10.7 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring major re-architectures, new APIs for extensibility, and polish to the user experience.

This macrocosm in Budgie 10 series is currently the following:

- Budgie Desktop
- Budgie Desktop View: A dedicated desktop icons implementation.
- Budgie Control Center: A fork of GNOME Control Center with various value-add such as Raven keybind support, improved fractional scaling support when supported by the operating system, re-organization of functionality.
- Budgie Screensaver: Budgie Screensaver is a fork of gnome-screensaver intended for use with Budgie Desktop and is similar in purpose to other screensavers such as MATE Screensaver.

We expect downstream consumers of Budgie to use following:

- [Budgie Desktop](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) 10.7+
- [Budgie Desktop View](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop-view?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) 1.2.1+
- [Budgie Control Center](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-control-center?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) 1.2.0+
- [Budgie Screensaver](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-screensaver?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) 5.1.0+

## New Application Indexer

Budgie 10.7 introduces a new application indexer, replacing our use of libgnome-menus and unifying our logic used in both Budgie Menu and Budgie Run Dialog, for consistency in the applications we show. This new indexer provides more reliable indexing of applications across several directories which are used to store desktop files.

Our implementation improves the categorization of applications, aggregating entries into more relevant and used categories (for example, "Administation", "Settings", and "System" would all be aggregated into "System"), while respecting custom desktop directories created by the users through third-party menu editors that write to the user's `.local/share/desktop-directories` folder.

Related to the application indexer, our searching in Budgie Menu has been abstracted out into its own "relevancy search" that is now used in both Budgie Menu and Budgie Run Dialog, providing a consistent search experience.

## Budgie Desktop Settings

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieDesktopSettings.jpg)

Budgie Desktop Settings now has a new design for widget selection, applying to both panel widgets and our new Raven widget system. This design shows relevant developer information such as the author, website, description, and copyright information. We also communicate if the widget plugin is "built-in" (ships with Budgie).

## Budgie Menu

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieMenu.png)

Budgie Menu has been drastically improved in 10.7, with new functionality and improvements to application launching.

### Dual-GPU Support

Budgie Menu now leverages [switcheroo-control](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/switcheroo-control?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) if available to switch between GPU environments when launching applications that request it. Users with dual-GPU setups can now launch their applications without necessarily having to worry about which GPU is in use and manually switching between them.

### Personal User Menu

Budgie Menu now provides a "personal user menu" which has quick XDG directory access. This feature enables you to open up a file manager (or technically whatever your inode/directory handler is) directly to folders like Home, Documents, Music, etc. This follows the [XDG Base Directory Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), so if you have for example a different path set for Music (**or your system locale is not English**) that will be respected. Folders which do not exist will be automatically hidden, so the menu will only show items which are relevant to you!

### Quick Settings and Power Access

In the new bottom strip of Budgie Menu, we now have buttons for launching Budgie Desktop Settings, Budgie Control Center, and our new Power Dialog (which we will get into later). You no longer need to search for these in the menu or access them by right-clicking on the desktop.

### Improvements to accessing Budgie Control Center panels

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieMenuShowingControlCenterItems.jpg)

An option has been added to the Budgie Menu widget settings to show Budgie Control Center settings items (such as bluetooth, sound, and power panels) in the applications list. You will always be able to search for these items regardless of the option being enabled though, so you can have less clutter in your menu while still having quick access to various settings panels.

### Other Improvements

Here is a short list of other improvements to Budgie Menu:

- We no longer reload the Budgie Menu during a AppIndex change when the menu is open, preventing your category and application list from re-rendering while you are actively using the menu.
- We now ship a default menu icon that is similar in design to the grid icon that is used when the user enables the new "Use Default Menu Icon" option in the Budgie Menu widget settings, or if the currently selected icon theme is in the following list:
  - Adwaita
  - HighContrast
  - hicolor
  - "default"

## Budgie Run Dialog

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieRunDialog.jpg)

Budgie Run Dialog has been updated in 10.7 to leverage the new application indexer and relevancy search service, enabling it to have consistent search results compared to Budgie Menu.

Alongside this update, we have introduced a couple visual changes as well:

1.  The width is now computed from the work area of the screen that the Run Dialog is opened on. This should make it look good on different sized monitors.
2.  The label for the name and description of applications in the launcher buttons has been split into two labels. This allows more fine-grained styling than was previously possible.

## Budgie Screenshot

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieScreenshot-2.jpg)

Budgie 10.7 introduces a new Budgie Screenshot application built into the desktop that enables you to quickly take screenshots of windows, areas, or your entire screen. Budgie Desktop no longer relies on gnome-screenshot for its screenshotting capabilities, all of the existing default keybinds will now call `org.buddiesofbudgie.BudgieScreenshot`. Users still have the option to use a different screenshotting solution (e.g. Flameshot) should they desire.

## Notification Enhancements

Significant improvements around Notifications have landed in 10.7.

### General UX Improvements

There has been a swath of improvements to our rendering of notifications:

- Notifications will now fade in and out upon showing and closing.
- Fix large fonts pushing the close button out of the popup
  - This sets the notification body to use the size of the widget for wrapping instead of a character length. Notification titles also were given a margin-end to prevent overlapping the close button.
- Prevent notification popups from stealing input focus
- Notifications should no longer cause screen flickering when in a fullscreen application.

![BudgieNotificationsBodyText](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieNotificationsBodyText.png)

- Width chars were added so that the body text always has the same minimum and maximum size per line, so the entire popup body is filled by the label. Lines is set to 2, so only two lines of text is displayed. Note that this does not mean two lines in the popup; it's two lines of the actual notification text. This allows long lines to wrap (and wrapped lines don't count towards lines, because reasons) without popups taking up large amounts of screen real-estate. Xalign is set to 0 to ensure that the text always starts at the left (because halign and justify isn't enough).

### Notification Summary

When a window leaves fullscreen mode, Budgie will now show a notification popup to alert the user that there are notifications that they didn't see. This notification is only shown if there are actually notifications.

### Spec and Control Center Setting Compliance

Improvements have been made in supporting more of the FreeDesktop Notification spec, namely notification sounds are now supported. As not all applications will be displayed currently in Budgie Control Center and some applications such as Element and Discord have separate capabilities to play notifications sounds, we do not have sounds enabled by default.

Applications that show in Budgie Control Center under its Notifications panel can be configured to have sounds on or off. Alongside this, we now respect the "Show Message Content in Popups" option in Budgie Control Center's Notification panel for an application and will hide content when it is disabled there.

Some notifications set a timeout of 0, which the spec says means that it should never expire. Our implementation doesn't really fit that, since persistence is done by Raven, not the notification server. As such, we set a different minimum show time for the popups to ensure that one is actually shown when it should be.

## Raven

Budgie 10.7 introduces the largest set of changes and features since the 10.5 release. It has largely been re-architected with a brand new pluggable Raven widget API system, allowing third-party developers to build their own Raven widgets, as well as seeing new widgets and updated designs to existing widgets.

### Raven Widget API

![](/images/blog/2023/01/Raven-DevHelp.jpg)

Like our Budgie Panel widget API, you can now build widgets for Raven leveraging libpeas (providing support for writing plugins in C, Python, and Vala) and our set of APIs. This **finally achieves** our end goal for Raven since the beginning of Budgie 10, which has been to provide a extensible widget and notification center.

This documentation, like the panel API, is currently provided via gtk-doc and browsable via [devhelp](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). In the future, it will be available directly from our documentation center with reference examples.

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieDesktopSettings-RavenFunctionality.jpg)

These widgets will automatically show up in Budgie Desktop Settings.

As a result of this re-architecture around Raven and leveraging past work on the panel widget plugin API, Raven widgets can now be positioned to your heart's content and you can even remove the ones you don't want (as opposed to just hiding them like our past implementation). All of the widgets that ship with Budgie Desktop leverage the same plugin architecture as third-party ones will.

### New and improved Raven widgets

![](/images/blog/2023/01/Raven-WidgetView.jpg)

Budgie 10.7 includes updates to some of our existing Raven widgets alongside a brand new one!

- The Media Player widget now has a more compact design.
- You can now click on the widget header icons for sound output and input to mute the respective device.
- You can now turn off day names in the Calendar widget.
- We now have a new Raven widget called Usage Monitor. This is a minimalistic widget that displays CPU, RAM, and Swap usage.

### Other Changes

Here is a short list of some other changes to Raven:

- The Power Strip, which has been off by default since 10.5, has been deprecated in favor of our improvements around the power dialog and more accessible power options via Budgie Menu.
- Refinements have been made to margins and paddings of widget components.
- Notifications are now sorted oldest to newest.

## Power Dialog

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgiePowerDialog.jpg)

Budgie 10.7 introduces a new Power Dialog for common actions such as shutdown, reboot, suspend, and more. This functionality replaces the actions exposed through the User Indicator applet, no longer requiring it to be added to the panel. The User Indicator will now invoke the Power Dialog and the new button in Budgie Menu will do the same!

The Power Dialog is invokable through D-Bus, allowing third-party applet developers such as those making their own menu implementations to easily incorporate our power dialog options without much effort or requiring them to implement duplicate functionality. You can also invoke the power dialog with our handy (Win/Super)+Shift+P keybind.

Hibernation is dynamically enabled / disabled based off system support and is offered as a compile-time option to disable on operating systems which do not provide hibernation support out-of-the-box, such as Fedora.

## Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

### Bug Fixes

- Fix repeated terminal messages about non-existent desktop-directories folder. [#232](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/232?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

### Other Improvements

<iframe
  src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mn229MnaV1M?feature=oembed"
  frameBorder="0"
  allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
  allowFullScreen=""
  title="Budgie 10.7 Icon Tasklist Scaling"
></iframe>

IconTasklist icons will now be scaled to the target size of approximately 2/3 that of the size of the panel itself, up to an icon size of 54px, where it shifts to the panel size minus 18. This allows for icons to scale to much smaller and much larger sizes, while retaining desirable icon sizes for dock setups, and while maintaining the same icon size for the default panel size of 36px.

- Add dock ability for panel.ini / layouts. [#88](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/88?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Configurable size for the Workspace switcher widget, enabling a selection of predefined multipliers for how many icons to show in each workspace. [#163](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/163?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Move polkit and power dialogs to libexecdir. [#260](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/260?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Update workspace item icons when the window icon changes. [#230](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/230?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [David Mohammed](https://github.com/fossfreedom?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Evan Maddock](https://github.com/EbonJaeger?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Jacob Vlijm](https://github.com/Jacob-Vlijm?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.7 Released


# 2022

The new life of a Phoenix comes from the ashes of its predecessors. Budgie Desktop is similar in this regard, with its new life and new organization coming from its separation from the Solus project almost exactly one year ago.

This "rebirth" provided the opportunity to:

1.  Shift our ways of thinking from being product-oriented with development and integration that was more aligned with that of Solus, to one which is platform-oriented and is aligned with our desired adoption of open standards and extensibility for all consumers of Budgie Desktop.
2.  Onboard more contributors from a diverse set of organizations, from Ubuntu Budgie to Arch, EndeavourOS, Ultramarine, and more.
3.  Define as an organization our objectives for 10.x and 11.x, as well as what an "end" for 10.x would look like.
4.  Build on points 2 & 3 by defining our "Core Values" and ways of working as an organization that guide us on the right path for our community and to achieving our goals. These Core Values being: Independence, Transparency, User-centric.

Although there are always improvements to be made, such as around community engagement and communication, 2022 has really been the year of foundation building for our community and organization. It has been rewarding to see it grow over the course of the year, with new people chatting away in our Matrix space*,* folks dropping in during our regular development "stand-ups", and endless amounts of feedback in our development room on various features and functionality that has either influenced the work gone into 10.7 or providing more for us to be mindful of going into 11 and beyond. Budgie Desktop development is never been more diverse and full of optimism.

## A Wealth of Releases

### Budgie Desktop

Within the span of 2022, Budgie Desktop has received **five** new releases, starting with the 10.6 series release and four "patch" releases. For context, the five releases before 10.6 happened over the timespan of **2017 to 2021**. Most of those releases were done simultaneously to those of Solus or around the time of GNOME stack upgrades in Solus, so moving away from that effectively being the release cadence to one which is not associated with the release of any specific operating system or its upgrades has been beneficial to the Budgie community as a whole.

While there are too many bug fixes in the 10.6 series to list, I would like to highlight some of the major improvements Budgie 10.6 series has seen through 2022.

##### Budgie Panel

Budgie Panel and many of its applets saw:

- Rewrite initial applet layout to prevent position desync.
- Reset IconTasklist buttons if group updated while pinned. This fixes an issue where pinned LibreOffice buttons would no longer appear when launching its instance.
- Fix math for calculating right panel strut. This fixes an issue where a right-positioned panel could overlap with windows.
- Removed delay when opening apps in IconTasklist. This was introduced in our application tracking system in an attempt to fix Chrome profile manager closing sequence but ended up breaking some other apps (such as Steam) closing sequence.
- Increase size and density of workspaces in workspace applet.
- [Introduced support](https://youtu.be/ezOXzmuo8v8?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) for setting the item size multiplier in the Workspace Applet, providing users more flexibility on the size of the applet and how many desired items appear for each Workspace at once.
- Fix crash in Clock Applet when attempting to set a custom timezone.

##### Internal Theme and Panel Refinements

Budgie Desktop 10.6 saw improvements to its current internal theming and panels. Some aspects included:

- Border radiuses on most dialogs, Raven Widgets, Panel Popover content.
- Unified color scheme for widgets within the panel.
- Removing of "stylized end regions" due to inconsistencies across GTK themes and internal theme.
- Precise battery levels icons are now used when supported by the icon theme. This means the icon will get updated on 10% intervals.
- Updated the default panel configuration to reflect the one that was used in Solus via its Budgie Desktop Branding package. This change better communicates our expectation for the default Budgie experience. Prior to this change, there were large inconsistencies such as panel location and widgets, between distributors such as Arch Linux and other consumers like Solus.

##### Notification System Rewrite

Our Notification Server saw a rewrite and move out of Raven, enabling it to be utilized in other Budgie components, as well as providing the opportunity to fix long-standing issues and improvements in the popups themselves. Some highlights:

- We now use the GTK.Stack for Notification popup bodies, providing a better way to reflect notification body content.
- We now properly utilize the Notification's appinfo, fixing issues where Notification Groups could present the wrong name (such as with Evolution and its calendar events).
- Clicking on a Notification Popup will now trigger the default action instead of adding a button for the default action.

### Budgie Control Center

This year saw the forking of GNOME Control Center into Budgie Control Center, which offers various value-add such as:

- Raven keybind support
- Improved fractional scaling support when supported by the operating system (requires the use of a patched Mutter with xrandr functionality)
- A re-organization of functionality and removal of GNOME Shell-specific functions
- Support for distribution logos so operating systems would not be required to patch our control center like they do with GNOME Control Center in order to display their branding instead of the GNOME logo. We also have special handling for light / dark theme variants for logos.
- Updated details with Budgie Desktop versioning

This work has been spearheaded by David Mohammed aka fossfreedom, from the Ubuntu Budgie team, with five releases of Budgie Control Center throughout the year.

### Budgie Screensaver

[Budgie Screensaver](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-screensaver?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) development picked up steam thanks to Campbell Jones, with four new releases in 2022. Budgie Screensaver is a **very old fork** of GNOME Screensaver, originally intended to be a drop-in replacement with most patches backported from Ubuntu, so it is great to see quality of life improvments being made and standards being improved. Budgie Screensaver has been:

- Ported over to Meson
- Received fixes for compiling under musl, system language changing, and input grabbing (now using GdkSeat)
- Had much needed cleanup around compiler warnings

### Budgie Desktop View

[Budgie Desktop View](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop-view?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) saw its 1.2 bug fix release this year as well. This fixed launching with some file types, updated to our menu option to open "System Settings" (now Budgie Control Center), as well as a renaming of our settings schemas to use the reverse DNS naming for Buddies of Budgie instead of Solus.

## Budgie 10.7 Development

Development of Budgie 10.7 has been underway and while it was originally the goal to release it within 2022, the extra time huddled in its nest has provided room for more features and polish to make its way into what will be another big release for Budgie 10. While I could not possibly touch on all the great work that has been done on this upcoming release, here are some highlights of what we know is getting into the release already.

### Budgie Menu Design and Architecture Improvements

![](/images/blog/2023/01/StateOfTheBudgie_July2022.jpg)

Budgie Menu has been improved for Budgie 10.7. I covered some of this in a past State of the Budgie, but I'll recap some of it. With the new Budgie Menu, you will have:

1.  Access to a personal user menu which has quick XDG directory access. This feature enables you to open up a file manager (or technically whatever your inode/directory handler is) directly to folders like Home, Documents, Music, etc. This follows the [XDG Base Directory Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)_._
2.  Access to a power menu with all the options you would come to expect such as suspend, hibernate, logout, and power off. This may change by the time Budgie 10.7 is released as there is more work being done on improving the UX across Budgie Desktop for power menus.
3.  Capability for an application to launch on a specific GPU if [switcheroo-control](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/switcheroo-control/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is installed when PrefersNonDefaultGPU is set to true for a given desktop file. This is handy for hybrid graphics / dual GPU scenarios.
4.  Quick access to Budgie Control Center and Budgie Desktop Settings.
5.  An option via the Budgie Menu settings in Budgie Desktop Settings to show Budgie Control Center settings items (such as bluetooth, sound, power) in the applications list. You will always be able to search for these items regardless of the option being enabled though, so you can have less clutter in your menu while still having quick access to various settings panels.

### Run Dialog Refactor and Improvements

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieRunDialog.jpg)

Budgie Run Dialog has received considerable improvements for 10.7.

- Budgie Run Dialog now leverages our new application indexer that is used for Budgie Menu to find and sort applications. This provides a predictable fuzzy search experience across both of them and enables the same setting of GPU profiles during application launching.
- Improvements around run dialog sizing so it's calculated on the workarea of the monitor it is launching on.
- Improvements centered on styling such as label for name and application descriptions being split in launcher buttons.

### New Screenshot Functionality

![](/images/blog/2023/01/BudgieScreenshot.png)

Budgie Desktop 10.7 will introduce a new Budgie Screenshot application, with support for the screen, window and selection capture! You will no longer need a separate screenshot application such as gnome-screenshot for screenshotting under Budgie Desktop, with the keybinds now defaulting to invoking our screenshot functionality instead.

## New Or Improved In More Places

Since the separation of Budgie Desktop from Solus, more attention has been put into Budgie Desktop's availability and the quality of its availability across various operating systems.

- Campbell Jones aka serebit is now an Arch Linux Trusted User, officially maintaining Budgie Desktop and its components under Arch Linux.
- Budgie Desktop under EndeavourOS has seen polishing by its team and we are fortunate to have them in our community.
- Budgie Desktop made its way into the official repository of Fedora with the release of Fedora 37. I have also proposed the creation of a [Fedora Budgie Spin](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FedoraBudgie?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), providing another way of getting an out-of-the-box Budgie experience.
- We have seen recent community efforts on Budgie Desktop under nixOS as well as OpenBSD. Hopefully those will evolve in 2023!

## 2023

While 2022's theme has turned out to be an exercise in our "Independence" value, with a bigger focus on tackling various parts of the foundation of Budgie and developing a consistent and predictable set of components around it, it is my goal for Buddies of Budgie and Budgie Desktop for 2023 to be its exercise in **both** our "User-centric" value from work done on 10.x and "Transparency" through more communication and work on 11 (_spoilers_).

Putting aside the usual caveat of these items being: none of it is finalized, everything is subject to change based on discoveries throughout the development / iteration process, collaboration and feedback from team members, and no accounting for any surprises 2023 might have in store for us – you get the point – here are _my_ initial thoughts on what we should _strive for_ in 2023.

## Q1

For Q1 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Release of Budgie 10.7 and at the very least a 10.7.1 for bug fixes.
- Release of new budgie-backgrounds, providing a rich set of backgrounds for Budgie users to choose from alongside any from their OS of choice, whether that be: modern architecture, scenery, space, abstract digital art, or of course pictures of cute animals. Gotta have cute animals.
- Release of Buddies of Budgie site and Docusaurus for documentation, continued improvements on both fronts. These properties will help to define Budgie Desktop and our organization, communicate our organization values, detail our current roadmap, document developer APIs and creation of panel and Raven widgets, document user features, and more.
- Beginning development of 10.8, with current slated items being around a new StatusNotifier-oriented system tray, streamlining theme selection, a new network indicator, and improvements around the "legacy" tasklist.
- Producing a unified and up-to-date schedule of the upcoming freeze and release dates of non-rolling release operating systems that ship Budgie Desktop in their repositories, to help guide the organization in its iteration of Budgie Desktop and maximize the chance of new features and fixes being shipped in them. That leads to a better experience for us developing and maintaining Budgie Desktop but more importantly a better experience for all of our users.

## Q2

For Q2 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Release of Budgie 10.8
- Review of defined project items for 10.x that should make its way into a 10.9 release

Alongside those two items, I will be starting work on speccing out the ["Protocol buffers"](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) for the Budgie 11.x Daemon and creating POCs (proof of concept) in Rust for review as RFCs (request for comment). These POCs will serve to influence the architectural design or be the foundational work for Budgie 11.

## Q3

For Q3 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Release of at least one Budgie 10.8 "patch" release e.g. 10.8.1
- Work on 10.9 items such as improved Bluetooth support and new Raven widgets using the new Raven APIs coming in 10.7.
- Active experimenting with wlroots and smithay to determine the most optimal path for Budgie 11 (e.g. wlroots + C or smithay for Rust)
- Start implementation of at least Bluetooth (bluez) and power management (upower) in new 11.x budgie-daemon.

### Q4

For Q4 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Finish Bluetooth (bluez) and power management (upower) implementations in new daemon.
- RFC Budgie Configuration (TOML file-based serializing, deserializing, setting migrations, per-panel / per-applet configuration, etc.)
- Continue our experiments with Wayland compositors and protocols, informing us on how we want to spec out the separation of concerns for Budgie WM, Budgie Daemon, and responsibilities of various graphical components.

---

Realistically based on the current bandwidth and size of the team, I believe the above items are achievable, many of them involve lots of tinkering and maybe some late night cups of coffee or tea. There are some items not touched on for specific quarters that might be nice to see, such as an EFL or iced port of Budgie Desktop View, or abstracting out application tracking into a Rust-based library around the timeframe of Q3 / Q4 that can be used in both current Budgie 10 and future 11.

# Summary

I hope this State of the Budgie provided a good summary of the work that the Buddies of Budgie organization and broader Budgie community has invested in 2022 and goals for 2023. At the very least, it should serve as a good foundation to build on and provide a clear picture on where Budgie Desktop is going this year: Budgie 10.x will receive new features, QoL improvements, and fixes. Budgie 11 development will be underway.

On a personal level, it has been heartwarming to see the community growth and evolution of Budgie Desktop over the last year. Forking a well-known project into a completely separate organization is not always easy but I believe that we have done well to not only start it off on the right footing, but also instill confidence in our community that Budgie Desktop has a brighter future because of it. I look forward to what we all can accomplish together in 2023 together. ❤️

<OCCallout />


State of the Budgie: 2022 In Review and Goals for 2023


[Budgie 10.6.4](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.6.4?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is the fourth minor release in the 10.6 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release contains bug fixes and build system improvements.

These changes are backported from our in-progress 10.7 series, which will feature major upgrades to Budgie Menu, our internal theming, and more. This development process allows us to focus longer-term on features and larger overhauls while still being able to address issues [raised on our issue tracker](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) in a timely manner.

## Changelog

- Clock Applet: Update timezone if no custom timezone set. [#92](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/92?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Workspace Applet: Fixed a regression in Timeout / interval. [#187](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/187?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Fixes drag & drop. [#182](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/182?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Fixes right-click menu persistence. [#184](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/184?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Fixes some icon flickering. [#183](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/183?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- build: Fix missing gio-unix-2.0 dependencies in meson.build files, preventing build under NixOS. [#185](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/185?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Federico Schonborn](https://github.com/FedericoSchonborn?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Thomas Staudinger](https://github.com/Staudey?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Source Code

You can get the source code for this release [here](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.6.4?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org).

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.6.4 Released


[Budgie 10.6.3](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.6.3?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is the third minor release in the 10.6 series of our Budgie Desktop environment, introducing improvements to our Workspace Applet and initial support for GNOME 43!

These changes are backported from our in-progress 10.7 series, which will feature major upgrades to Budgie Menu, our internal theming, and more. This development process allows us to focus longer-term on features and larger overhauls while still being able to address issues [raised on our issue tracker](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) in a timely manner.

## Workspace Applet Improvements

<iframe
  src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ezOXzmuo8v8?feature=oembed"
  frameBorder="0"
  allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
  allowFullScreen=""
  title="Budgie 10.6.3 Workspace Applet Scaling"
></iframe>

Budgie 10.6.3 [introduces support](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/163?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) for setting the item size multiplier in the Workspace Applet, providing users more flexibility on the size of the applet and how many desired items appear for each Workspace at once.

## GNOME 43 Support

Budgie 10.6.3 introduces our initial support for the upcoming GNOME 43 stack with support for the Mutter 11 API. This support unblocks inclusion of Budgie Desktop in Fedora rawhide and makes it easier for maintainers across a wide range of operating systems to deliver Budgie without needing to do the manual work of backporting patches.

## Other Improvements And Fixes

- Improve scaling change message to request further user action ([#120](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/pull/120?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org))
  - When changing display scaling, we will inform the user that they should restart their session to allow the desktop to refresh & resize properly.
- Fix crash in Clock Applet when attempting to set a custom timezone. ([#164](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/164?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org))
- Internal Theme: Dim labels in menu when submenus are revealed

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [David Mohammed](https://github.com/fossfreedom?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Source Code

You can get the source code for this release [here](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.6.3?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org).

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.6.3 Released


This is the State of the Budgie for July 2022, covering the latest happenings in the month of July!

## Budgie 10.6.2

[Budgie 10.6.2](budgie-10-6-2-released/) was released a few weeks back, resolving issues in our daemon, panel, and panel widgets. This was the second release of the 10.6 series and the third release already with Budgie Desktop being under the Buddies of Budgie organization, so I am quite happy with the momentum thus far and it is certainly an improvement over the last few years.

## Budgie 10.7 Development

Budgie 10 continues to be our primary focus as we work on various re-architectures of the desktop, from moving more business logic from widgets to the daemon, to providing major quality-of-life improvements, with 10.7 being the next 10 series release.

### Budgie Menu

One of the items we will be shipping in Budgie 10.7 is a new Budgie Menu. This new Budgie Menu provides improvements to both its user experience as well as its architecture. Since UX improvements are more eye-catching, we will start with that first.

![](/images/blog/2022/08/StateOfTheBudgie_July2022-1.jpg)

As you can see in the featured image, Budgie Menu in many ways is quite similar to what it was before, with the key differences being at the bottom of the menu. With the new Budgie Menu, you will have:

1.  Access to a personal user menu which has quick XDG directory access. This feature enables you to open up a file manager (or technically whatever your inode/directory handler is) directly to folders like Home, Documents, Music, etc. This follows the [XDG Base Directory Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), so if you have for example a different path set for Music (_or your system locale is not English_) that will be respected. Folders which do not exist will be automatically hidden, so the menu will only show items which are relevant to you.
2.  Access to a power menu with all the options you would come to expect such as suspend, hibernate, logout, and power off. This will be the preferred default way of performing these operations going forward, centralizing this functionality where many users expect, as opposed to being put into the User Indicator widget. The User Indicator widget will still be around so various operating systems which ship Budgie Desktop can have the choice to retain the previous layouts or complement it with their own menu, but the default Budgie Desktop experience will have not have the User Indicator added by default.
3.  Capability for an application to launch on a specific GPU if [switcheroo-control](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/switcheroo-control/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is installed when PrefersNonDefaultGPU is set to true for a given desktop file. This is handy for hybrid graphics / dual GPU scenarios.
4.  Quick access to Budgie Control Center and Budgie Desktop Settings.
5.  An option via the Budgie Menu settings in Budgie Desktop Settings to show Budgie Control Center settings items (such as bluetooth, sound, power) in the applications list. You will always be able to search for these items regardless of the option being enabled though, so you can have less clutter in your menu while still having quick access to various settings panels.

![](/images/blog/2022/08/relevancysearch-1.jpg)

This fancier user experience is powered by a more robust architecture, starting with a new application indexer in our daemon that replaces our previous use of libgnome-menus. This library tended to create some inconsistent results when it came to application indexing and a common one was apps not showing up after installation, requiring the user to restart budgie-panel or relog for it to trigger properly. Our indexer has more consistent behavior and even works with user created custom menus.

Alongside this, we have a new "relevancy service" that is leveraged in Budgie Menu and is planned to be leveraged in a new Budgie Run Dialog. This relevancy service is used for search and keep track of how each application is relevant to a given search term. This code was inspired by work done on Brisk Menu and takes into account the application name, "generic name" of an app (like "text editor"), description, executable, and keywords. Finding apps should get much easier starting in Budgie 10.7!

## Packaging Efforts

An important part of the user journey is making it as effortless as possible to start using Budgie Desktop, no matter what Linux-based operating system the user wants to use. In the month of July, we have made headway on improving the Budgie Desktop experience across two major operating systems: Arch Linux and Fedora.

### Arch Linux

Budgie Desktop has been available via the Arch Linux repository for years, providing the opportunity for users to get the latest of their favorite desktop environment alongside the latest of their favorite applications. With all the changes happening in the Budgie ecosystem since the beginning of this year, we noticed that some of them were not making their way into the official Arch repositories.

For example, Budgie Control Center is a mandatory component and is only available in the [AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/budgie-control-center?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). This makes it less discoverable to Budgie users, does not get automatically pulled in as part of the installation, and as a result the user may be left wondering what control center they should use. In the past, Budgie Desktop has been able to leverage GNOME Control Center due to many similarities, however as the GNOME team has been working to expose more GNOME Shell capabilities via GNOME Control Center, this has resulted in a widening set of issues when used under Budgie. Specific panels that would attempt to get GNOME Shell settings would cause segfaults and due to panel restoration in GNOME Control Center, it would always attempt to load that segfaulting panel at next launch and require the end user to launch a specific panel from the terminal to get back into a usable GNOME Control Center.

It was for this reason and the desire to streamline the control center experience that we forked GNOME Control Center into Budgie Control Center and began shipping it as part of the 10.6+ experience. As there has not been a dedicated Budgie maintainer under Arch in the recent past (rather solely being done in the spare time of various Arch contributors), these new changes under the new org, coupled with new components, did not get fully incorporated into the repos, which has resulted in a sub-optimal experience for users under Arch.

Campbell Jones, aka serebit, is a multi-year contributor to Budgie Desktop, a team member in the Buddies of Budgie organization, and an avid Arch Linux users. Last month, he applied to become an Arch Trusted User, which would enable him to support Budgie Desktop on Arch Linux in an official capacity, providing our users on Arch an excellent experience, and it is our hope that he will be approved this month!

### Fedora

Alongside efforts to improve support in Arch Linux, we have been working to support Budgie Desktop officially in Fedora. Fedora is the only major operating system without Budgie in its official repos and as someone that really enjoys the Fedora experience as a user, developer, and server admin (having used Fedora Server for years), it made perfect sense to not only bring Budgie Desktop to Fedora but also strive to get an official spin of Fedora with Budgie as well.

Currently all packages except for budgie-desktop itself (budgie-control-center, budgie-desktop-view, and budgie-screensaver) are in Fedora 37 (current rawhide) and the Budgie Desktop package is currently awaiting review. My personal goal is to get it landed in rawhide in August and begin exploring 36 backporting as well as spin creation!

<OCCallout />


State of the Budgie: July 2022


[Budgie 10.6.2](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.6.2?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is the second minor release in the 10.6 series of our Budgie Desktop environment, introducing fixes for bugs and improving code quality!

These fixes are backported from our in-progress 10.7 series, which will feature major upgrades to Budgie Menu, our internal theming, and more. This development process allows us to focus longer-term on features and larger overhauls while still being able to address issues [raised on our issue tracker](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) in a timely manner.

# Bug Fixes & Improvements

- Abomination
  - Attempt re-adding nameless windows on name change. Fixes an issue with application tracking of some Flatpak-based applications like Spotify. [#105](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/105?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Budgie Daemon
  - Disconnect from the allocation changed signal to avoid having notification popups move unexpectedly. Fixes an issue where Notifications could move when trying to close them. [#147](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/147?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Drop unnecessary Comment in daemon desktop that produces warning.
  - Fixes spec compliance for closing notifications. [#118](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/118?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Set notif popup position after size allocation. Fixes an issue with notification positioning. [#139](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/139?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Set a minimum expiry timeout for notification popups. Some applications set a timeout of 0, which the spec says means that it should never expire. Our implementation doesn't really fit that, since persistence is done by Raven, not the notification server. So, we should have a minimum show time for the popups to ensure that one is actually shown when it should be. [#129](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/129?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Budgie Panel
  - Fix math for calculating right panel strut. This fixes an issue where a right-positioned panel could overlap with windows. [#145](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/145?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - IconTasklist: Swap button key in hashtable when first_app changes. Fixes an issue when multiple apps could be shown as active. [#93](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/93?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Rewrite initial applet layout to prevent position desync. [#72](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/72?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Icon Tasklist
  - Prevent segfault when attempting to swap buttons.
  - Reset ITL buttons if group updated while pinned. This fixes an issue where pinned LibreOffice buttons would no longer appear when launching its instance. [#107](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/107?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Reset ITL button's first_app and class group app on swap. This allows the tooltip of affected apps like Discord to update after the app is initially launched.
- Power Indicator
  - Fix journal spam by only emitting warning once when we fail to get device data. This is typically seen on virtual environments. [#151](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/151?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- Workspace Applet
  - Adjust app spacing and align with panel edges. [#108](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/108?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Increase size and density of workspaces in workspace applet. [#106](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/106?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
  - Workspace item size now independent of workspace width

Alongside the above mentioned fixes, this release has code quality improvements, such as updates to our Meson build system support, cleanup of deprecated functions from third-party libraries, and reducing compiler warnings.

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie and contributors from around the world. Here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [Campbell Jones](https://github.com/serebit?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [David Mohammed](https://github.com/fossfreedom?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Evan Maddock](https://github.com/EbonJaeger?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Joshua Strobl](https://github.com/JoshStrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Source Code

You can get the source code for this release [here](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/releases/tag/v10.6.2?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org).

<OCCallout />


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