Budgie 10.10.2 is our second minor release of the Budgie 10.10 series. This release adds further improvements to our labwc bridge, improves application matching in Icon Tasklist, general stability fixes, and more!

#Features and Improvements

#labwc Bridge

The labwc bridge is the glue between Budgie Desktop and the labwc compositor, translating your desktop settings into the compositor's native configuration. This release brings several improvements to that integration. Theme setting - You can now set a labwc window decoration theme independently via Budgie Desktop Settings, giving you more control over the look and feel of your window decorations under labwc.

Keyboard and locale handling - We have reworked how the bridge handles keyboard layouts and locale settings. The bridge now supports the freedesktop locale1 interface (systemd-localed) as a source for keyboard layouts, with a fallback chain to /etc/default/keyboard and then a US layout default. XKB options are properly sourced and merged from GSettings, systemd-localed, and /etc/default/keyboard. Importantly, the environment file is no longer rewritten on each login, so any user changes will be preserved. Touchpad configuration - Touchpad scroll method is now synced from GNOME settings into the labwc config. For users upgrading from earlier releases, missing peripheral configuration sections in rc.xml are automatically recreated. Additionally, the touchpad left-handed setting can now be separated from the mouse left-handed setting, so southpaw trackpad users no longer need to flip their mouse as well.

General bridge maintenance - Various code tidying and improved migration handling round out the bridge changes in this release.

#Icon Tasklist

Application matching rework - This release introduces a new ApplicationMatcher class that uses multiple strategies to match windows to their desktop entries. The matcher tries the following to find the right match:

• StartupWMClass
• Reverse-DNS lookups
• Java package names
• Snap naming conventions
• Lastly, case-insensitive fallbacks

This addresses long-standing issues with non-standard applications like Tilix, jEdit, snaps, and Proton Pass, resulting in better matching, grouping, and more reliable pinning behavior.

Popover fix - Windows in the Icon Tasklist popover are now identified by their exact window reference instead of their class ID. This fixes incorrect window removal from popovers, particularly when only one window of that class was open. We also fixed a bug when closing the last remaining window of a given app. Show-all-windows-on-click fix - Corrected the activation behavior of application groups when the show-all-windows-on-click option is enabled. This change also fixed an inverted condition for the middle-click-to-launch-new-instance feature.

#Budgie Menu

Budgie Menu sizing has been improved across various resolutions. We removed unnecessary scaling logic (similar to the HiDPI fix applied to Icon Tasklist) that was causing "stubby" menus after scaling down, since the compositor already handles scaling. The menu height now targets 35% of the workarea height, clamped between a minimum of 480px and a maximum of 600px. This keeps the menu usable on lower resolution screens without becoming overly tall on 4K and above. On most higher resolutions, this will result in slightly more menu items being shown at once. Menu categories are also now locale-aware and properly sorted, so international users will see their application categories in the correct order.

#Show Desktop

The Show Desktop functionality has been reworked with a proper DBus interface. The Super+D keybind now works as expected. Budgie now tracks which windows were minimized at the time of showing the desktop and only unminimizes those when toggling back. Previously, toggling back would also restore windows that had been intentionally minimized before showing the desktop.

#Screenshot Path Persistence

Custom screenshot save paths now persist across sessions in budgie-screenshot. If you set a preferred save location, it will be remembered the next time you take a screenshot.

#Dialog Focus Behavior

Run and Power dialogs now behave correctly with sloppy and mouse focus modes. The dialogs wait until the cursor is over them before allowing focus-loss hiding, preventing them from disappearing the moment focus shifts elsewhere. This delivers on the promise made in the Budgie 10.10.1 release notes about improving transient dialog behavior with non-click-to-focus modes.

#Crystal Dock Support

We have added background support for Crystal Dock running under wlroots compositors. This includes edge border handling to cover a 1px bleed-through that could occur when autohide is active and an application is maximized.

#Bug Fixes

As always, this release squashes a number of bugs across the desktop:

• Icon Tasklist scaling: Removed manual scaling factor usage. Wayland handles DPI natively, so the extra scaling factors were causing oversized icons.
• OSD visibility: On-screen displays are now visible over fullscreen applications, having been moved to the Overlay layer.
• Raven animation: Fixed the fade-in animation for the Raven notification/widget panel.
• Session fixes: Ensured budgie-desktop is part of XDG_DATA_DIRS and that xdg-desktop-portal is started in the labwc session.
• AppIndexer: Fixed the refresh interval, which was treating milliseconds as seconds.
• QEMU workaround: Set WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS to fix the upside-down cursor issue in QEMU/virgl environments.
• Window activation: Improved exception handling for window activation calls.
• Compiler standards: Removed hardcoded c11 standard, now deferring to the distro default.

#Packaging Changes

Budgie 10.10.2 adds eglinfo (provided by egl-utils on Fedora, mesa-utils-extra on Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions) as a new runtime dependency. Packagers should ensure this is included when updating their Budgie packages.

#Call for Contributors: Input Method Support

We want to improve the multi-lingual input experience in Budgie Desktop under Wayland. If you are familiar with IBus or Fcitx and have experience getting them working well under Wayland compositors, we would love your help. We are looking for contributors who can help us integrate these input methods more seamlessly so that users don't have to figure out the setup on their own. If this is something you can help with, please check out issue #881 on GitHub and share your knowledge or contribute directly.

---