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.

State of the Budgie: 2024 In Review and Goals for 2025


Budgie 10.9.2 is the second minor release of Budgie 10.9 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release fixes some bugs related to notifications, workspace applet, TabSwitcher and more.

While we have been hard at work on our Wayland porting efforts for our upcoming 10.10 release, we felt it important to provide a small release to address some of the issues that have been reported by our users, as well as to make it easier for packagers of Budgie to get the most relevant fixes to users without introducing any of the larger Wayland-related changes that have either already landed in our main development branch or will be over the course of 10.10's development.

## Bug Fixes

- Budgie Menu: We will now show applications which report as being Terminal-based (e.g. `Terminal=true` in their desktop file). Users of applications like Neovim rejoice!
- Budgie Run Dialog: Fixed a regression where our setting of skip pager and taskbar was not being called during construction, which resulted in it showing up in our task switchers (IconTasklist and Task List).
- Dialogs: Fixed end session dialogs blocking authentication dialogs.
- Notifications: Fixed an issue where a notification's default action would be performed when the close button was clicked.
- Specification Compliance: Fixed an issue where we referred to the restart / reboot icon as "system-restart-symbolic" instead of "system-reboot-symbolic". This should improve compatibility with icon themes while retaining our own icon as a fallback in the event the icon theme does not provide it.
- System Tray: Fixed an issue whereby some applications would not show with their intended icon. This is the result of such applications (e.g. Cinny and Tauon) being non-compliant with the [StatusNotifierItem specification](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierItem/StatusNotifierItem/) by providing absolute paths to icons instead of either an icon name or icon data.
- TabSwitcher: We will no longer show an empty switcher when there are no windows to actually switch between.
- Workspace Applet
  - Fixed an issue where clicking a window icon would not perform an intended workspace switch.
  - Fixed left scroll direction. In libxfce4windowing, _our_ concept of "left" maps to their "down", but "right" is still "right".
- build: Re-hide warnings that were previously hidden in Meson < 1.4.0. In 1.4.0, it began to show warnings that are largely the result of bad C codegen in the Vala compiler, resulting in unreadable log spam and making it substantially more difficult to see actual warnings that need to be addressed.
- vapi: update to support libxfce4windowing 4.19.3

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie, with contributors around the world. Alongside all of our amazing translators, here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [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)
- [Lev Kokotov](https://github.com/levkk)
- [Sam Lane](https://github.com/samlane-ma)
- [Vasiliy](https://github.com/voidpointer0x00)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.9.2 Released


Budgie 10.9.1 is the first minor release of Budgie 10.9 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release squashes some bugs in the TabSwitcher and Workspace applet.

## Bug Fixes

- TabSwitcher
  - Fixed inconsistent window focusing.
  - Fixed windows from other workspaces showing up when the user has not enabled the "Show all windows" option.
  - Added dynamic max column setting on our switcher's FlowBox, so it will no longer take up more room than necessary.
- Workspace applet
  - Fixed icon scaling when using scaling that is greater than 100%.
- Added missing manpage for org.buddiesofbudgie.sendto.
- Updated default vendor wallpaper.

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie, with contributors around the world. Alongside all of our amazing translators, 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)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.9.1 Released


Budgie 10.9 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, introducing a redesigned Bluetooth applet, early porting efforts towards supporting Wayland, and adopting budgie-session for session management.

## Redesigned Bluetooth applet

Budgie 10.9 features a redesigned Bluetooth applet. This applet now provides direct (dis-)connect functionality for paired Bluetooth devices, battery life indicators, as well as functionality for sending files to Bluetooth devices.

Architecturally, our Bluetooth applet eliminates the use of gnome-bluetooth (a helper library on top of bluez D-Bus APIs) and instead directly communicates to BlueZ and UPower over D-Bus. Previously, Budgie Desktop had been using an older version of gnome-bluetooth which did not require Libadwaita and GTK4. As we looked towards expanding our Bluetooth functionality and easing long-term maintenance, we decided to deprecate our use of this older library and similarly leverage BlueZ and UPower D-Bus APIs directly. As an added benefit, this will enable some distributions to completely drop that old gnome-bluetooth from their repositories!

## Initial Wayland ports

Budgie 10.9 features some initial ports of various applets and components of Budgie Desktop to a Wayland-compatible library: [libxfce4windowing](https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4windowing).

libxfce4windowing is an abstraction library developed by XFCE that "attempts to present windowing concepts (screens, toplevel windows, workspaces, etc.) in a windowing-system-independent manner". It aims to accomplish this by supporting X11 through [libwnck](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libwnck) and support for various Wayland protocols (e.g. [wlr foreign toplevel management](https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-foreign-toplevel-management-unstable-v1)).

While libxfce4windowing is under active development and not yet ABI stable, we choose to already adopt it to make the transition from Budgie 10 under X11 to Budgie 10 under Wayland as seamless as possible. libxfce4windowing enables us to port functionality to support Wayland without negatively impacting use under X11, facilitate early "[dogfooding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food)" when our porting work is complete, and more effortlessly "flip the switch" to support Wayland and fully drop X11.

The following parts of Budgie have been ported to libxfce4windowing in this release:

- Show Desktop applet
- TabSwitcher (Alt+Tab window switcher)
- Workspace applet

While porting, we took the opportunity to rewrite most of the TabSwitcher. Its window list is no longer rebuilt every time it is invoked and we no longer pass around window IDs between the window manager and tab switcher to build the UX. All of the relevant state and functionality is now internal to the switcher.

<Alert icon={false} severity="warning">
  Note for packagers: You may wish to reference [Fedora's packaging
  spec](https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/libxfce4windowing/blob/rawhide/f/libxfce4windowing.spec) when packaging
  libxfce4windowing, if it is not already available in your repository. This provides a clear example of using the
  "dist" tarballs as well as configuring the library **without** needing xfce-dev-tools 4.19.x. Do **not** use
  xfce-dev-tools 4.19.x unless it is already available in your repository, as this may negatively impact XFCE packaging.
</Alert>

## Use of budgie-session

Budgie 10.9 takes into use [budgie-session](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-session/), our "softish fork of gnome-session, designed to provide a stable session manager for Budgie 10.x". budgie-session v0.9.x is forked from GNOME Session 44.x, ensuring that we retain:

1. X11-related session code up until we are ready to switch Budgie to being Wayland-only
2. ConsoleKit support for our BSD friends.

<Alert icon={false} severity="warning">
  Note for packagers: budgie-session **is** co-installable with gnome-session. Budgie 10.9 **will not** launch without
  budgie-session being available, so be sure to package it for your respective distributions and have it as a dependency
  of budgie-desktop!
</Alert>

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie, with contributors around the world. Alongside all of our amazing translators, 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)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.9 Released


## 2023

2023's theme was centered around our "User-centric" organization value. We focused on this value in a couple important ways:

1. Delivering major new features and architectural improvements across Budgie 10.7 and 10.8 releases.
2. Improving stability and UX consistency with bug fixes and new components such as Magpie (our fork of Mutter 43.x).

Across 2023, we had a total of 15 releases spanning our microcosm of projects in our organization and the addition of 3 new projects (budgie-backgrounds, budgie-session, and magpie).

Additionally, the team significantly shifted its development focus in mid 2023 towards moving Budgie 10 to being Wayland-only. While this did mean that some efforts on Budgie 11 were deferred to this year, it also accelerated other areas with a focus on tackling one of the biggest components (Wayland compositor) that could be used for both Budgie 10 and 11.

### Budgie 10

Budgie Desktop saw a total of 6 releases of Budgie 10.x throughout 2023. We kicked off the year with Budgie 10.7 in January, with bug fixes and QoL improvements in February and April. In August, we released Budgie 10.8 and followed up with two bug fix releases in 10.8 series in October. The rest of the year was focused on porting various components from using libwnck directly to libxfce4windowing for Wayland support and of course some much deserved rest for the holidays!

While I will refrain from exhaustively writing about all the amazing work that has gone into those releases (or else this will turn into the Odyssey by Homer), we will highlight some areas, with snippets from the respective blog posts.

#### New Features

##### Budgie Menu

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

Budgie Menu got a lot of love in 2023. In Budgie 10.7, we introduced:

1. Dual-GPU Support via switcheroo-control integration. Users with dual-GPU setups are able to launch their applications without necessarily having to worry about which GPU is in use and manually switching between them.
2. Personal User Menu with quick XDG directory access. This feature enabled the ability to open up a file manager directly to folders like Home, Documents, Music, etc.
3. Easier access to Budgie Desktop Settings and Budgie Control Center. This one is pretty self-explanatory, right?

Some annoyances when using Budgie Menu like category and item reloading when adding new items (for example, installing software while having the menu open) were fixed and we started shipping a default menu icon for a more consistent experience across a wider range of icon themes.

In Budgie 10.8, we rewrote our fuzzy menu searching algorithm to work with non-Latin based languages. Following up on some valuable feedback from users, we tidied up our menu categories to reduce confusion where applications might be placed.

##### Budgie Screenshot

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

We introduced a new Budgie Screenshot application built into the desktop that enables you to quickly take screenshots of windows, areas, or your entire screen. This eliminated a reliance on gnome-screenshot for its screengrab capabilities while still ensuring users have the option to use a different screenshot solution (e.g. Flameshot) should they desire.

#### Budgie Desktop Settings

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

Budgie Desktop Settings started sporting 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).

#### Notifications

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

Notifications were improved throughout the year in a couple areas:

1. Experience
2. Spec Compliance & Control Center Integration
3. General Fixes

**Experience**

- Notifications fade in and out upon showing / closing rather than just popping into view.
- When a window leaves fullscreen mode, a notification popup will be shown to alert the user that there are notifications that they didn't see.
- Refinement to body text in the form of width chars for consistent minimum and maximum size per line, so the entire popup body is filled by the label.
- Improved text wrapping.

**Spec Compliance & Control Center Integration**

- Improvements were made in support of the FreeDesktop Notification spec, specifically support for notification sounds was introduced. 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.
- The "Show Message Content in Popups" option in Budgie Control Center's Notification panel is respected.
- We have refined how long notifications are displayed for those applications that don't set their expiry time. Since persistence is done by Raven, not the notification server, we set a different minimum show time for the popups to ensure that one is actually shown when it should be. This provides a more consistent notification display management.

**General Fixes**

- Prevented notification popups from stealing input focus.
- Notifications should no longer cause screen flickering when in a fullscreen application.

#### Raven

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

Raven is a key pillar of the Budgie experience and 2023 was a big year for it. In Budgie 10.7, we introduced the largest set of changes and features to it since Budgie 10.5.

1. It was re-architected with a brand new pluggable Raven widget API system, enabling third-party widget development.
2. Updated design for existing widgets and widget ordering capability.
3. New Usage Monitor widget for CPU, RAM, and Swap usage.

##### Re-architecture & Widget API

Similar to our Budgie Panel widget API, the Raven Widget API leverages libpeas to provide support for writing plugins in C, Python, and Vala. 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 be positioned to your heart's content and you can even remove the ones you do not want. All of the widgets that ship with Budgie Desktop leverage the same plugin architecture as third-party ones will.

##### Updated Design

While we made these changes, we took the opportunity to refresh the widgets:

- The Media Player widget has a more compact design.
- Widget header icons for sound output and input are interactive and will mute the respective device.
- Day names in the Calendar widget can be turned off.
- Power strip, which was disabled clear back in 10.5, was finally removed in favor of our Power Dialog and more accessible power options in Budgie Menu.

#### Power Dialog

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

A new Power Dialog for common actions such as shutdown, reboot, suspend, and more was introduced. This functionality replaced the actions exposed through the User Indicator applet, no longer requiring it to be added to the panel.

This new dialog enables 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. This was achieved by making the menu D-Bus invokable, and keyboard driver users can invoke the power dialog with our handy (Win/Super)+Shift+P keybind.

#### Other

Here are some other smaller improvements sprinkled across the year:

1. IconTasklist scaling for icons was introduced, enabling dynamic scaling for smaller and larger panel sizes alike while retaining desirable icon sizes for panels in "Dock mode".
2. The previously third-party Budgie Trash Applet, developed by Buddies of Budgie team member Evan Maddock (EbonJaeger), was merged into mainline Budgie in 10.8.
3. Privilege Escalation Dialogs show the action description and ID so you know what is requesting access.
4. power-profiles-daemon support was integrated into our battery indicator, so you can switch between Balanced, Power Saver, and Performance modes depending on device support.

#### Architectural Improvements

##### Application Indexer

Budgie 10.7 introduced 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 indexer is more reliable across a wider variety of directories which are used to store desktop files.

##### Status Notifier Support

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

The System Tray applet was completely overhauled in Budgie 10.8. Historically we have used either `na-tray` or the XEmbed Protocol for the creation, management, and rendering of trays icons. In Budgie 10.8, our System Tray 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.

#### Magpie v0.x

During our announcement post related to our Wayland plans, we further announced our Budgie-specific fork of Mutter as it was in GNOME 43. The goal of this was to address regressions that were, understandably, incrementally introduced into Mutter related to X11 support. These regressions created a wide-range of issues for users and it was determined that our engineering time would be best spent focusing on Wayland rather than fixing up X11-specific bugs and updating Budgie to support new Mutter ABI changes. Magpie v0.x provides us a stable ABI that can be leveraged across multiple GNOME Stack releases until Magpie 1.0 (built on wlroots) is released.

Budgie 10.8 was the first release to start requiring Magpie v0.x and the result has been a more consistent and reliable experience for our users.

## Wayland efforts

While our goal in 2023 was only to start experimenting with Wayland compositors and to take the learnings from those experiments to apply to a "future Budgie WM compositor" built for Budgie 11, we made a significant shift in our development focus starting middle of last year to accelerate our Wayland plans and work towards Budgie 10 being Wayland-only (and continuing to be Wayland-only going into Budgie 11). This was in recognition of several major developments in the broader ecosystem that we covered in our [Wayland](/wayland) post.

In that lengthy post, we covered our experiences at that point with wlroots as well as XFCE's libxfce4windowing library, which provides us a library which supports both X11 (via libwnck) and Wayland (various Wayland protocols) at the same time. This is especially useful as we iterate on making Budgie Wayland-compatible while using it at the same time.

I am happy to report that progress on Wayland support has been steady on all fronts since our shift in development focus to it.

In Budgie Desktop, several applets and UX components of Budgie Desktop have been ported over or are in the process of being ported:

- Show Desktop Applet has been ported
- Tab Switcher has been ported
- Workspaces Applet has been ported
- IconTasklist Applet is currently being ported

Keep in mind that not every part of the codebase needs to be touched, but some key areas in the codebase will need to be updated once some newer window tracking logic has been merged in from the IconTasklist conversion: MenuManager (right-click menus), Panel Manager (manages panels), the legacy Tasklist needs to be rewritten, and various uses of Gdk.X11 APIs.

On the compositor front, the progress by Campbell Jones (aka serebit) has been fantastic as well. Budgie's Wayland compositor, codenamed Magpie v1, was started in the form of a separate project called Flyaway at the end of April 2023. Since then, Magpie v1 has been fleshed out into a reasonably functional window manager with support for things X11 could only dream of. It's still a ways from becoming ready to integrate into Budgie proper, but you can already use it to run Waydroid and games through Steam (though variable refresh rate and direct scanout support are still pending)!

## 2024

For the new year, our focus is on two "epics".

### Budgie 10 Epic

Our main epic is delivering Budgie 10 on Wayland. This does not necessarily mean everything will be feature complete, as we still need to finesse, research and define what else needs to be done. Our aim though is to ensure our first release can be daily driven and consumed.

For Q1, our focus will be:

1. Delivering Budgie 10.9 (as early as this month) featuring our initial work with libxfce4windowing, as well as our new requirement for using budgie-session for launching Budgie Desktop. This will include the existing applets and Tab Switcher that have been ported and should provide plenty of time for distribution packagers to get Budgie Desktop into their respective releases without running up against any freeze deadlines.
2. Expand on various definitions of work for the year related to Budgie 10 in the areas of: daemon and xdg / flatpak portal.
3. Getting Budgie Desktop running in a Wayland or XWayland session for better testing.
4. Early daemon development work that was deferred last year. Some of this work will be done for the purposes of bridging the existing Budgie Control Center and Magpie v1.

For Q2, our goals are:

1. Round out any remaining Wayland work in Budgie Control Center and Budgie Desktop specifically so it should be usable under Magpie v1.
2. Begin any portal work defined in Q1.

For Q3 and Q4, our focus is to deliver a Budgie 10 series release that is Wayland-only. As we iterate on that series, we will continuously evaluate if it is ready to be daily driven by the wider community.

When we have considered that to be the case, we will officially put Budgie 10 into maintenance mode. Maintenance mode for us means that only changes to facilitate Wayland support and bug fixes will be addressed. This maintenance would be performed by a dedicated Budgie 10 team, enabling those focused squarely on Budgie 11 to be able to dedicate more time towards its development.

### Budgie 11 Epic

Our secondary epic is Budgie 11 development, with focus on building out key components such as the daemon, early panel and applet functionality, and a new Budgie Control Center.

This work will be spread out across the year, with most of the focus before putting Budgie 10 into maintenance mode being related to Magpie and the daemon. There may be porting work done on components in Budgie Desktop's microcosm like Budgie Desktop View, or even smaller components used in Budgie 10 itself depending on how cohesive an experience we can make it, but realistically most of the UX focus will gravitate towards the end of the year and center around early panel and Control Center developments so the team can start "dogfooding" Budgie 11 as soon as possible.

## In Summary

It has been really incredible to see all that we have accomplished in 2023, with new contributors, new users, and new operating systems delivering Budgie Desktop. Huge thanks to the team and community for constantly improving on Budgie.

2024 is going to be a really exciting year for Budgie Desktop too! The first time we all experience Budgie running under Wayland is going to be a real highlight. We should be putting ourselves in a position where we can finally close the exceedingly long chapter of Budgie 10 development efforts and focus on the next chapter of Budgie Desktop. We are going to learn a lot on our journey developing Budgie 11. With your help, the Buddies of Budgie community will continue to grow and engage with other projects.

<OCCallout />


State of the Budgie: 2023 In Review and Goals for 2024


Budgie 10.8.2 is the second minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release features some bug fixes around the system tray, notifications, and a small improvement to Budgie Screenshot.

## Bug Fixes

- System Tray icon scaling will now be correctly applied on initial launch, fixing a bug where you needed to toggle the scaling on and off again for it to re-apply in the "off" position. [#467](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/467)
- Fix custom icon path reading in System Tray, resulting in an unresponsive panel over time for some users. [#456](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/456)
- Added fallback logic to our AppInfo fetching for Notifications. Some applications (such as nemo and streamlink-twitch-gui) have a mismatch between the `desktop-entry` they provide and their desktop file. In cases where the hint fails, we will now try to guess the ID using the application's name given to us from DBus. [#477](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/477)

## Improvements

- Budgie Screenshot will now use a more limited scoped directory for the temporary image it generates. This temporary image will attempt to store itself as `.budgiescreenshot_tempfile` in the user's `XDG_RUNTIME_DIR`, falling back to the user's `HOME` directory if that runtime directory does not exist. This is more aligned with the [XDG Base Directory Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html), which specifies that user-specific runtime and other file objects should be placed in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

---

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie, with contributors around the world. Alongside all of our amazing translators, 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)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.8.2 Released


Budgie 10.8.1 is the first minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release adds dark style preference support, squashes some bugs around our new StatusNotifierItem implementation, adds keyword support for search, and more!

## Dark Style Preference Support

For years, Budgie Desktop Settings has provided a "Dark Theme" toggle in its Style settings. This setting has been used to set the preference for Budgie Desktop itself to be light or dark, depending various factors such as if Built-in theme is toggled off and GTK theme support.

However, this setting would not apply to applications themselves, which resulted in a confusing user experience. While there are still some improvements we plan on making to further improve application styling consistency, we are excited to announce that with Budgie 10.8.1 our Dark Theme toggle will now set the Dark Style Preference!

<iframe
  title="Budgie Desktop Now Support Dark Style Preference"
  width="100%"
  src="https://tilvids.com/videos/embed/672fd276-077d-49c3-8e21-12ae48282f6c?loop=1&amp;muted=1&amp;title=0&amp;warningTitle=0&amp;peertubeLink=0&amp;p2p=0"
  frameBorder="0"
  allowFullScreen
  sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-popups"
  style={{
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  }}
></iframe>

When supported by the application or its toolkit, Dark Style Preference can be used to provide the suggested user preference for light or dark theming (`prefer-light` and `prefer-dark` respectively). Some applications may enforce a specific color scheme, for example a photo editor may prefer a dark canvas to enable content to stand out, however overall this standardized, vendor-neutral setting should help to create a more consistent experience for our users.

## System Tray Improvements and Fixes

Budgie now has an option to toggle scaling of tray icons with the panel size. With the introduction of StatusNotifierItem support for our System Tray in Budgie 10.8, the default was to scale these icons, however based on user feedback and in our own testing, it was found that this did not pair well with the Status Indicator. With 10.8.1, we have provided the option to enable this scaling should you desire and have turned it off by default.

<iframe
  title="Budgie Desktop 10.8.1: System Tray Icon Scaling"
  width="100%"
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Thanks to issues filed by our users, we have also identified and now handle several instances of inconsistent StatusNotifierItem implementations. These inconsistencies could result in crashes or blank menus, which are certainly not ideal!

- nm-applet (NetworkManager Applet) would occasionally have blank menus.
- TeamViewer's incorrect implementation of the StatusNotifierItem specification would trigger panel crashes. Added stronger value VariantType checking to prevent this from happening.

## Notification System Improvements

Our Notification System has seen several improvements and fixes in Budgie 10.8.1. Building on significant notification work done in past releases of Budgie (10.7 and 10.7.2), we were able to simplify our logic around constructing and fetching of existing Notification Groups in Raven by taking advantage of improvements to our Notification objects from Budgie Daemon.

This should result in a slight reduction in overall memory usage as we no longer need to leverage a [Hash Table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table) of application names to groups for lookups, rather we are able find any existing relevant Notification Group via GtkListBox children iteration.

Icons rendered in both Notifications (external to Raven and in Notification Groups) are now consistent as we are handling more of the logic in the Notification object, with Raven simply using the Notification's provided application icon or notification icon (app icon taking precedence) rather than doing lookups itself.

During this testing, we identified a couple bugs for squashing as well:

- Spotify nowadays reports as `com.spotify.Client` instead of just `Spotify` in its notifications, which resulted in it being unintentionally stored in Raven. This ID has been added to our "spam-apps" list, which is a list of applications that emit notifications which should be considered ephemeral or not expected to provide the end user any added value.
- Missing markup on Notification titles resulting in ampersands not being parsed.

## Other Fixes and Improvements

- Keyword support is now supported in our fuzzy searching across Budgie Menu and Run Dialog. You can now search for things like "browser", "editor", "performance" and get more relevant results!
- We now ship an XDG Desktop Portal configuration with the default portal being `gtk`. This should fix support for applications running in flatpak when using xdg-desktop-portal 1.18.0+, such as the [FileChooser](https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser) portal.
- Fixed compilation errors against latest GCC in Fedora 39+.
- Active Profile initialization has been moved to occur after we have added the radio buttons, which should fix a mismatch between what Budgie Control Center reports and what the Power Indicator shows.

---

## Contributor List

Budgie Desktop is developed by Buddies of Budgie, with contributors around the world. Alongside all of our amazing translators, here is a list of all the contributors that made this release possible:

- [Anthony Cook](https://github.com/acook)
- [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)
- [Marco Galli](https://github.com/Gaarco?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [justchen1369](https://github.com/justchen1369?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

<OCCallout />


Budgie 10.8.1 Released


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, with contributors 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, with contributors 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 />


News

Featured Blogs

State of the Budgie: 2024 In Review and Goals for 2025

2024 was a pivotal year for Budgie Desktop, with our Budgie 10.9 release series and our focus on our move to Wayland. Time to dive into our State of the Budgie to recap our efforts in 2024 and the goals for 2025.

Joshua Strobl

January 6, 2025

Budgie 10.9.2 Released

Budgie 10.9.2 is the second minor release of Budgie 10.9 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release fixes some bugs related to notifications, workspace applet, TabSwitcher and more.

Joshua Strobl

June 22, 2024

Budgie 10.9.1 Released

Budgie 10.9.1 is the first minor release of Budgie 10.9 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release squashes some bugs in the TabSwitcher and Workspace applet.

Joshua Strobl

February 2, 2024

Budgie 10.9 Released

Budgie 10.9 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, introducing a redesigned Bluetooth applet, early porting efforts towards supporting Wayland, and adopting budgie-session for session management.

Joshua Strobl

January 28, 2024

More Recent Posts

State of the Budgie: 2023 In Review and Goals for 2024

2023 was an amazing year for Budgie Desktop and our organization. Time to dive into our State of the Budgie to recap our efforts in 2023 and the goals for 2024.

Joshua Strobl

January 26, 2024

Budgie 10.8.2 Released

Budgie 10.8.2 is the second minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release features some bug fixes around the system tray, notifications, and a small improvement to Budgie Screenshot.

Joshua Strobl

October 18, 2023

Budgie 10.8.1 Released

Budgie 10.8.1 is the first minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release adds dark style preference support, squashes some bugs around our new StatusNotifierItem implementation, adds keyword support for search, and more!

Joshua Strobl

October 1, 2023

Budgie 10.8 Released

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!

Joshua Strobl

August 20, 2023

Wayland.

Let's talk about our plans for Wayland support for Budgie Desktop and the work we are doing to make it a reality.

Joshua Strobl

July 7, 2023

Budgie 10.7.2 Released

Budgie 10.7.2 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.

Joshua Strobl

April 26, 2023