Budgie 10.10.3 is our third minor release of the Budgie 10.10 series. This release adds favorites to Budgie Menu, brings back the Keyboard Layout applet, lets you choose your primary monitor, introduces free placement of desktop icons, improves our labwc integration, and more!

#Features and Improvements

#Budgie Menu

#Favorites

If you can believe it, up until this release of Budgie Desktop, favoriting / pinning applications has been limited to our Icon Tasklist. With the release of Budgie 10.10.3, you can now favorite applications right in Budgie Menu! To favorite an application, right-click it in the menu to expand its options, then choose "Add to favorites." For an application you have already favorited, the same option reads "Remove from favorites." The expanded options also include the application's desktop actions, such as opening a new window or a private browsing window, the same actions you would find in the Icon Tasklist popovers. Under the hood, the menu and Icon Tasklist now share the same code for these actions, so they list the same things in both places. Once you have favorited something, a new Favorites category appears in the menu, above All. It stays out of the way until then, and if you remove your last favorite while viewing it, the menu takes you back to All. Favorites work in compact mode too. Since compact mode does not have a category list, your favorites are grouped at the top of its single list instead, under a Favorites header, or separated from the rest of your applications when headers are turned off. Favorites are saved per Budgie Menu, so if you have a menu on more than one panel, each can have its own set. Just do not ask what will happen when opening multiple Budgie Menus at once (like with the meta key), "with great power comes great responsibility."

#Focus Fix

Since the release of Budgie 10.10, Budgie Menu and all of our applet popovers have been GtkPopovers, which greatly simplifies our positioning logic. The downside is how popovers work under Wayland. A GtkPopover is an xdg_popup, a child surface of the panel, and it only receives keyboard input while the panel itself has focus. Clicking the Budgie Menu button focused the panel, so searching worked as expected. However, opening the menu with the Super key does not involve the panel at all, and an application cannot take keyboard focus away from another window on its own. The result was the menu opening while your typing still went to the window you had open before, and even after clicking into the search field, Enter would not launch the selected app (issue #842). That certainly did not make for a great user experience! During a fun weekend project of seeing "how hard would it be to move Budgie Desktop to GTK4" (it was not; I finished it in a day, including porting over libxfce4windowing), one of the things I did was tinker with making Budgie Menu a window again, so we could restore the search input being focused. The desire was not to port every popover back to a window, as that would be an ABI break. Budgie Menu does not expose an ABI, so it could be safely moved, and most of the applets do not need that specific input focus for their popovers, so there was no incentive to incur the cost of an ABI break to facilitate it. I took the learnings from that and ported them into our budgie-desktop (GTK3) codebase, so Budgie Menu is now a proper GtkWindow again (as its own layer-shell surface), which the compositor can give keyboard focus to when it opens. Hit the Super key and start typing away!

#labwc Bridge

The labwc bridge is the glue between Budgie Desktop and labwc, the recommended compositor for Budgie 10.10. It runs in the background of your session and listens for changes to what you configure: your settings from Budgie Desktop Settings and Budgie Control Center, and the system keyboard settings from locale1. It translates those into labwc's own configuration: rc.xml for things like keybinds, window focus and theming, and labwc's environment file for your keyboard layouts. When one of them changes, the bridge rewrites the relevant file and reloads labwc, so the change applies right away. In 10.10.3, the bridge also listens to budgie-daemon, which is how the Keyboard Layout applet and the layout switching shortcuts reach labwc. We will expand on that in the Keyboard Layout Applet section later.

#Keybinds

In labwc 0.20.2, invalid entries in the rc.xml file caused an error to be shown on login. These invalid entries came from our bridge writing empty keybinds (issue #956). The keybinds the bridge manages now come from a template, and only keybinds that are valid get merged into rc.xml. Existing configs are cleaned up on login, and any keybinds you added yourself are kept. A keybind can also depend on an application being installed, or on a minimum labwc version, and is left out when either is not met. Distributions can ship their own template to customize the keybinds they provide.

#Multimedia and Launcher Keys

Play, pause, next and previous keys now work out of the box, going through a new media controller in budgie-daemon that talks to your current media player (issue #916). Volume up, volume down, mute and microphone mute keys continue to go through WirePlumber's wpctl, controlling your default output and input devices. Keys for launching a terminal, calculator, web browser, file manager or media player now work across distributions, using whichever common application is installed or your default application for that type.

#Focus Behavior

With sloppy or mouse focus, dropdown menus in some applications, such as Steam, would close as soon as you tried to click an item (issue #750). labwc 0.20 added a delay before raising a focused window, and the bridge now sets it from your auto-raise delay setting.

#Show Desktop

On labwc 0.20 and newer, Show Desktop now uses labwc's own action, and existing configs are migrated to it. Older labwc versions keep using our implementation.

#Config Migrations

As labwc continues to evolve (and improve!), the values we ship in rc.xml sometimes need to change too. The bridge now has a migration system for this. Each change is recorded against the rc.xml version that introduced it, and on login the bridge applies every change newer than your config's version, so even a config several releases behind catches up one step at a time. A change is only applied where the value is still the one we shipped, so anything you changed yourself is left alone. This makes it easier for us to make targeted fixes to existing configs over time. The first use of it fixes the maximize keybinds. Through 10.10.2, we shipped right and left as the directions for maximizing horizontally and vertically, which labwc now reports as errors, since it expects horizontal or vertical (issue #985). We will now automagically fix that!

#Reliability

The bridge was reorganized into smaller parts, and a number of crashes and edge cases were fixed along the way, such as a crash on a brand new user profile and a titlebar font setting that could cause a whole config write to be lost.

#Keyboard Layout Applet

You can also watch this video via PeerTube / MakerTube here. For the release of Budgie 10.10, we opted to disable the Keyboard Layout applet, as we did not wish to delay Budgie 10.10's release any further than it had been. The applet relied on IBus and X11-specific code that caused crashes under Wayland (issue #650). There was also no trivial mechanism for an application to find out which layout the compositor is using, so we knew we had to think about a good (or at least easy to reason about) solution before rushing to implement anything. As we have iterated on the Budgie 10.10 series since its release, improving our codebase as well as our integrations, we came up with a model for 10.10.3. The applet has returned, rewritten in C, and integrates with three key areas:

1. The "input sources" you already set up in Budgie Control Center
2. locale1 / systemd-localed
3. compositor-specific keyboard layout implementations via bridges

One of the larger design / implementation constraints we had to work with is that labwc does not support or listen to locale1. It only takes its keyboard layout from the XKB_DEFAULT_* variables in its environment file. Without something listening to locale1 on labwc's behalf, changing your layout with localectl would have no effect under labwc, so our bridge has to fill that role. budgie-daemon acts as a "communications hub" for both the applet and compositor bridges to talk to / listen to, through a new org.buddiesofbudgie.KeyboardLayout D-Bus interface. The daemon does not apply anything itself. Rather, when you pick a layout in the applet, the applet asks the daemon to set it, and the daemon broadcasts a signal that the layout was requested. The bridge for your compositor listens for that signal and does the work. Our labwc bridge writes the new layout to labwc's environment file and reloads labwc so it applies immediately. Switching layouts with Alt+Shift or Super+Space goes through the same path, with the daemon broadcasting a request for the next or previous layout. To complete the round trip, the bridge watches the environment file it writes. Once the file changes, it reads back the layout that we now know is active and sets it as the daemon's CurrentLayout property. The applet listens for changes to that property and updates the label on your panel. The bridge also listens to your input sources in Budgie Control Center and to locale1. When you reorder your input sources, or run localectl set-x11-keymap with no input sources configured, the bridge rewrites that same environment file, and the applet picks up the new layout the same way. This keeps our implementation as flexible as possible, as any other bridge can implement the same interface, such as Ubuntu Budgie's Wayfire bridge. For our labwc bridge specifically, when the bridge works out which layouts to write, it uses the first of these that is set:

1. The layout you last picked in the applet or with a shortcut
2. Your input sources in Budgie Control Center
3. The system keyboard layout from locale1
4. /etc/default/keyboard
5. US English, if nothing else is set

If you have not set up any input sources, such as on a live environment or a fresh install, the applet shows the layout from locale1, so at least you see what layout the bridge has applied. The bridge also attempts to set your system keyboard layout through locale1, so your TTY uses the same layout. We expect this to work on distributions like Arch Linux, Fedora and Solus, where Budgie Control Center's polkit rule lets administrators set it without a password prompt. Debian and Ubuntu are the exceptions, and there the layout only applies to your Budgie session.

Debian sets the keyboard layout through its own tooling and /etc/default/keyboard, so it keeps locale1 running for GNOME to read the layout, but blocks every attempt to set it, even from root. That does not impact just us: on Wayland, SetX11Keyboard is how installers like Calamares change the live session's layout, so keyboard selection breaks there too (Debian bug #1118702).

#Primary Monitor

With more than one display, depending on how your displays were configured and positioned, your panels could frequently land on the wrong one after a reboot or logging in (issue #954, issue #935). The Wayland protocols we use to learn about your monitors, wl_output and wlr output management, have no concept of a "primary" monitor, so no compositor can tell Budgie which one it is. With 10.10.3, you can now choose it yourself. Budgie Desktop Settings has a new Displays page, shown when you have more than one display connected. It lists your connected monitors, and you can set any of them as the primary with "Set as Primary". Your panels move to that monitor, as do things like notifications, on-screen displays, the Run dialog and the Power dialog. If you would rather let Budgie decide, "Use Automatic Selection" clears your choice. The page also has a button to open wdisplays, if you have it installed, for arranging and configuring the monitors themselves. Budgie also remembers the monitors you have previously set as primary, as an ordered list of fallbacks, which you can see on the same page. If your primary monitor is disconnected for more than a few seconds, the panels move to the next monitor on that list that is still connected. If it comes back within those few seconds, nothing moves at all. Similarly, whenever a monitor is connected or disconnected, Budgie checks again which monitor should be the primary. When your screens are turned off after being idle, Budgie ignores monitor changes until they are turned back on, so your panels should stay where they are.

#Raven

In previous Budgie 10.10 series releases, Raven could overlap your panels, depending on your panel layout (issue #843). Raven sized itself based on the size of your panels, while the compositor centered it within the space the panels left free, and whenever the two disagreed, Raven hung over the ends. Raven now stretches between the top and bottom edges of your screen and lets the compositor work out the space around your panels, so it fits between them. Raven also closes again when you click away from it, whether into another window or onto the desktop (issue #887).

The Usage Monitor widget now reads CPU, memory and swap usage through libgtop. It previously read them directly from files under /proc, which crashed the panel on systems where those files differ, such as postmarketOS on ARM (issue #890).

#Desktop Icons

You can also watch this video via PeerTube / MakerTube here. Our desktop icons implementation, Budgie Desktop View, originated 6 years ago (November 2020), back when Budgie Desktop was under the Solus umbrella. Back in those days, we (myself included, when I was a Solus team member) held back the Nautilus file manager, as it was responsible for the desktop icons implementation, which newer versions of Nautilus had removed. In late 2020, it was decided we would finally update Nautilus; however, I did not wish for desktop icons to simply go away for users. So I implemented a view that leveraged GtkFlowBox to provide a fixed, grid-like experience. This implementation, while useful, had its limitations, most notably the lack of arbitrary desktop icon positioning. We mitigated this slightly in a more recent version of Budgie Desktop View with the ability to custom order icons, but they were still stuck in the fixed layout. With Budgie Desktop View 10.10.3, you can now finally freely place desktop icons anywhere on the desktop.

#Placement and Layouts

Icons are placed on a grid based on your icon size, which you can now change with Ctrl+scroll. Positions are stored in grid cells, so your layout scales when you change icon size, and renamed files keep their spot. Budgie keeps a separate layout for each grid size, so returning to a resolution restores that layout exactly. A resolution you have not used before gets a layout based on the closest one you have, with icons keeping their distance from the nearest edges, so a Trash in the bottom-right corner stays in the bottom-right corner. A layout created for a new resolution is not saved until you move an icon, so a resolution you only use briefly does not leave a saved layout behind. If you are upgrading and had a custom icon order, it is imported the first time you log in, with Auto-arrange turned off so your order is kept.

#Selecting

You can now drag from an empty part of the desktop to select icons. To add to an existing selection, hold Ctrl or Shift while you click an icon or start a new drag. From the keyboard, Ctrl+A selects everything, arrow keys move between icons, and Shift+arrow adds to your selection.

#Arranging

The desktop's right-click menu has new Auto-arrange, Snap to Grid, Align to Grid and Sort By options:

• Auto-arrange, on by default, arranges your icons in columns, in the order you choose with Sort By. Moving an icon turns it off, keeping everything else where it is.
• Snap to Grid, also on by default, snaps icons to the nearest grid cell when you move them. With it off, you can place icons anywhere, and turning it back on aligns anything left between cells.
• Align to Grid moves your selected icons, or all of them, to their nearest free cells.
• Sort By sorts by name, type or date modified. Name is the default, and orders your desktop as Home, Trash, mounted drives, applications, folders and then files, with each group sorted by name. Home, Trash and mounted drives always come first, whichever order you pick.

Dragging a selection moves all of it at once. With Snap to Grid on, dragging icons between two others in a column automatically shifts the icons below to make room, and dropping puts your icons in that space. Dragging an icon further down its own column moves the icons it passes up into its old spot, like reordering a list. Icons pushed off the bottom of a column continue at the top of the next one, and an empty spot stops the shifting. If you move away from the gap or press Escape, the shifted icons go back to where they were.

#Moving Files

Dragging a selection onto Trash moves its files to the trash, with Trash highlighted in red while you are over it. Dragging it onto a folder, including Home, moves its files into that folder, with the folder highlighted in your selection color. If the folder already has a file with the same name, the moved file gets " (Copy)" added to its name, so nothing is overwritten. Files you drop onto the desktop from other applications land where you drop them.

#Thumbnails

Thumbnails now follow the freedesktop thumbnail specification, which means Budgie Desktop View shares a thumbnail cache with your file manager and other applications. If a file already has a thumbnail in that cache, it is used as-is. Otherwise, Budgie Desktop View generates one with the thumbnailers you have installed, such as glycin-thumbnailer for images or ffmpegthumbnailer for videos, and saves it to the cache for other applications to use. Loading images no longer blocks the desktop, so the default size limit for image thumbnails goes from 10 MB to 25 MB. We learned a lot from this overhaul. In the future, we intend to apply those lessons to a generic, desktop-agnostic Qt implementation. More on that another time :)

#Other

#oo7 Secret Service Support

Fedora 45 is switching its default Secret Service provider, which stores things like your saved passwords and application tokens, from GNOME Keyring and KWallet to oo7 (Fedora Change Proposal). Existing GNOME Keyring data is migrated to oo7 automatically. Budgie Desktop 10.10.3 adds opt-in support for oo7, which distributions can enable when building Budgie Desktop. With it enabled, Budgie Desktop starts oo7's daemon when your session starts, and routes the Secret portal used by sandboxed applications, such as Flatpaks, to oo7. It is off by default, so distributions still using GNOME Keyring are not affected.

#Translations

The Trash applet and the names of all 19 of our panel applets can now be translated (pull request #986). Thank you to all of our translators for their updates in this release!

#Bug Fixes

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

• Desktop icons: The bottom row of icons no longer sits underneath a bottom panel.
• Budgie Menu: Dragging an application from the menu to the desktop no longer hides the panel (issue #929).
• Budgie Desktop Settings: Clicking + or - on the number of workspaces now changes it by one, where it previously kept changing until it hit the minimum of 1 or the maximum of 8 (issue #903).
• Crystal Dock: Toggling desktop icons in Budgie Desktop Settings no longer freezes Crystal Dock.
• Tasklist:
  • The panel no longer jitters when launching an application on panels smaller than 40px (issue #895).
  • Clicking an application's button minimizes it again for applications such as Firefox and Vivaldi, where it previously did nothing (issue #907).
  • Switching workspaces no longer clears all of the buttons (issue #904).
  • Clicking an application with several windows now raises the one you used last.
• Icon Tasklist:
  • Scrolling on a touchpad now switches between an application's windows, the same as a mouse wheel (issue #693). Sensitivity will depend on your touchpad sensitivity, and direction depends on whether "Natural Scrolling" is off or on.
  • Windows from some Electron applications, such as Proton Pass and Proton Mail, now group with their pinned launcher.
  • Applications no longer get grouped under the wrong application when another application's desktop file loosely matches them. For example, with OBS Studio pinned and running, Android Studio's windows were grouped under OBS Studio instead of getting their own button.
• Panel:
  • Panel settings stay in sync after moving a panel to another edge.
  • The panel size you set now applies to the panel's content, where 5px of it had been going to the panel's shadow.
  • Fixed a rare crash after a popover was destroyed, for example when an application with an open Icon Tasklist popover closed.
  • Fixed a crash when checking which monitor is the primary one, reported through the Ubuntu error tracker.
• Raven:
  • Clicking a panel applet that toggles Raven while it is open now closes it, and quickly toggling Raven no longer leaves its animation in a broken state. You can now spam open/close with Raven to your heart's content and the animation will react correctly.
  • The Sound Output widget now shows the correct icon for Flatpak applications playing audio, where it previously showed a missing image icon.
  • Do Not Disturb now stays in sync between Raven and the Notifications applet. Toggling it from the applet left Raven showing the old state, and after a panel restart the applet showed its normal icon even with Do Not Disturb on.
• Polkit dialog: The dialog no longer hangs with high CPU usage, which also stopped the logout, restart and shutdown dialogs from appearing (issue #948).
• System Tray:
  • Tray icons from some Wine applications no longer cause type mismatch errors. This may fix session crashes reported with games launched through Lutris (issue #958, issue #960).
  • Menu icons are no longer re-added on every update, which caused bursts of warnings and was tied to a freeze on resume (issue #944).
• Login screen background: Your wallpaper is now shared with your login screen through AccountsService's standard interface, with the LightDM-specific one kept as a fallback, so display managers other than LightDM can pick it up too.
• Session: The labwc session start script now runs with /bin/sh, so it no longer needs bash.
• Log noise: Silenced a number of startup warnings and criticals from the tasklist, Raven's sound widget and the panel manager.

#Packaging Changes

#Budgie Desktop Dependencies

Budgie Desktop 10.10.3 adds a dependency on libgtop, which the Raven usage monitor now uses. It drops libwnck, IBus and intltool. Translation extraction now goes through Meson instead. When built with runtime dependency checks enabled, Budgie Desktop now also checks for the Python modules the labwc bridge needs: dbus-python, PyGObject and psutil, along with the Gio, GLib and Pango typelibs. python-systemd is now optional. Without it, the bridge simply logs to stdout.

#New Build Options

• with-oo7 (off by default) and oo7-libexecdir enable the oo7 Secret Service support covered above. With runtime dependency checks enabled, oo7-daemon and oo7-portal are required.
• gsd-components and gsd-components-excluded let you choose which gnome-settings-daemon components are started with the session, since not every distribution ships all of them. For example, gsd-disk-utility-notify needs GNOME Disks.
• budgie-session-libexecdir sets where budgie-session's executables are installed, if that differs from gnome-settings-daemon's.
• xdp-libexecdir sets where the xdg-desktop-portal executables are installed, for distributions that use per-package libexecdirs.

#labwc Keybinds

The keybinds the labwc bridge manages now come from keybinds.xml.example. Distributions can optionally ship their own keybinds.xml alongside it to customize the default keybinds.

#Budgie Desktop View

Budgie Desktop View 10.10.3 should be shipped alongside Budgie Desktop 10.10.3. It no longer closes Raven itself, since Budgie Desktop now does, so with an older Budgie Desktop, clicking the desktop will not close Raven. The minimum GLib version goes from 2.64 to 2.72. glycin-thumbnailer and ffmpegthumbnailer are optional, and used for thumbnails when installed.

#Budgie Desktop Services

Budgie Desktop Services 1.0.3 should be shipped alongside Budgie Desktop 10.10.3. It has added some guards in our output management system around metahead that should improve suspend-resume behavior.

#budgie-extras and Pocillo

Ubuntu Budgie has released a new version of budgie-extras alongside our release of Budgie Desktop 10.10.3. Pocillo also received an update that adds compatibility for the changes to Budgie Menu. If you package either of them, be sure to update them along with Budgie Desktop.

#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:

• David Mohammed
• Evan Maddock
• jls17
• Joshua Strobl
• Marco Nilsson
• Namelus11811

Thank you as well to everyone who reported issues, tested fixes, and helped us track down bugs during this release cycle!

#Release Stats

Leaving out translations and build system changes, here is how much changed since 10.10.2:

• Budgie Desktop: 61 commits, with 11,205 lines added and 5,528 removed across 178 files.
• Budgie Desktop View: 10 commits, with 4,500 lines added and 1,885 removed across 35 files.

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