Budgie 10.10.4 Released

Budgie 10.10.4 is our fourth minor release of the Budgie 10.10 series. This is primarily a bug fix release, but it also makes automatic and intelligent hiding work on Wayland, reworks dock mode, lets you switch Raven views with the keyboard, adds a shortcut for showing your panels, and more!

#Features and Improvements

#Panel Auto-hide and Dock Mode

You can also watch this video via PeerTube / MakerTube here. Ever since our move to Wayland with Budgie 10.10, automatic hiding and dock mode have been quirky to say the least. Under X11, Budgie could get the size and position of your windows, and hid a panel set to Intelligent whenever the focused window intersected it. On Wayland, Budgie gets its list of windows from the wlr-foreign-toplevel-management protocol, which tells us whether a window is maximized and which monitor it is on, but not its size or position. Without that, the overlap check we relied on had nothing to work with. In 10.10.3, a panel set to Intelligent "hid" by dropping behind your windows. That worked until a window was maximized: the panel was now underneath it, so moving your mouse to the edge of the screen did not bring it back up, and it stayed hidden until that window was no longer maximized (issue #950). Automatic did not hide the panel at all, and a dock set to hide still reserved its whole edge, so your maximized windows could not use that space either. With 10.10.4, the panel code received a major refactor, with automatic hide as well as dock mode receiving an almost complete rework. A hidden panel now stays above your windows, but is otherwise invisible with a small 3px area (the width / height of the panel depending on orientation) along its edge for capturing mouse events. Moving your mouse to that edge brings the panel back, and clicking anywhere else goes through to the window underneath. Panels will stay visible while one of their popovers is open, so you can use Budgie Menu, interact with IconTasklist popovers, change volume using the Sound applet, and so forth. Panels set to automatically hide also no longer reserve space on the screen, so your maximized windows can use the full screen.

#Automatic and Intelligent

Since Budgie cannot check whether a window intersects a panel, both policies now go by maximized windows instead:

• Automatic hides the panel whenever any window on its monitor is maximized.
• Intelligent hides the panel only while the focused window is maximized.

#Fullscreen Applications

If you are watching a fullscreen video, moving your mouse to the edge of the screen now shows the panel above the video. Games that lock your mouse pointer are not affected, as long as your compositor correctly supports / implements the pointer constraints protocol. Panels with "Automatically hide" set to Never stay behind fullscreen applications, and there are now two ways to bring your panels up over one (issue #600):

• Super+T is a new shortcut that shows all of your panels without opening Budgie Menu. Pressing it again hides them, as does moving your mouse over a panel and then away from it.
• The Super key now shows every panel when opening Budgie Menu, not just the panel the menu is on. If you are already opening the menu to launch an application, there is no need for a separate shortcut. The panels stay visible while the menu is open, and hide once it closes and your mouse is not over any of them.

#Raven

You can now switch between Raven's widgets and notifications views with the keyboard while Raven is open (issue #1005). Pressing Super+A or Super+N switches to that view, and pressing the shortcut for the view you are already on closes Raven.

#labwc Bridge

#Moving Windows Between Monitors

Super+Shift+arrow keys now move the focused window to the monitor in that direction, as they did on Budgie 10.9 (issue #1006).

#Picture-in-Picture

Picture-in-Picture windows, such as the ones from Firefox, now stay on top of your other windows (issue #1018).

#Clicking the Desktop

By default, labwc opens its root menu when you left click the desktop. On a touchpad, this was easy to trigger by accident, and since releasing the click over a menu item activates it, a tap and drag could end up with accidental launches (like of Budgie Desktop Settings). Left clicking the desktop now only focuses it, while right clicking still opens the root menu. This also fixes Budgie Menu and Raven not closing when left clicking the desktop with desktop icons turned off (issue #1004). Existing labwc configs are migrated on login, keeping any mouse settings you added yourself.

#Screen Dimming and Locking

You can now choose how long Budgie waits before dimming your screen (issue #999). The delay can be anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes, and setting it to 0 turns dimming off. The next release of Budgie Control Center will add it to the Power panel (pull request #128). Until then, you can set it with gsettings:

gsettings set com.solus-project.budgie-wm dimming-delay 90

You can also choose which screen locker Budgie uses, gtklock or swaylock (issue #1021). By default, Budgie uses the first one it finds installed, checking gtklock first:

gsettings set org.buddiesofbudgie.budgie-locker locker-choice 'swaylock'

If the locker you chose is not installed, Budgie falls back to the one that is.

#Faster Panel Startup

Previously, Budgie Menu, Icon Tasklist and the Autostart page in Budgie Desktop Settings each loaded the full list of installed applications separately, and Icon Tasklist did so again for every application it needed to match to a window. Now, the list is loaded once and shared across the panel, and reloaded when you install or remove applications. We measured the panel's first 90 seconds with 281 applications installed, with two runs per build for the timing measurements: The heap increase is the shared list of applications, which is kept for as long as the panel runs. Opening the Autostart page, and Icon Tasklist matching windows opened after startup, also use the shared list now.

#Development

Budgie Desktop now supports meson devenv, so you can run the panel, applets and Raven straight from your build directory without installing:

meson devenv -C build budgie-panel --replace &

#Bug Fixes

#Panel

In a language other than English, applets could disappear from the panel after updating to 10.10.3. Each applet's settings store the name of the plugin it comes from, and the panel matched that against the name libpeas reports for each plugin. Since applet names became translatable in 10.10.3, libpeas reports the translated name, so any applet with a translation failed to match and was dropped from the panel. Applets now store the plugin's module name in a new module key, which the panel prefers. Applets without it are matched against the untranslated name from the plugin's .plugin file, and translated names saved by 10.10.3 are still accepted. On login, the panel fills in the module key for existing applets and replaces any translated name with the untranslated one. Other panel fixes:

• A panel no longer stays hidden when one of its applets is not installed or fails to load. That applet is also removed from the panel's configuration.
• Budgie Menu no longer covers a panel that does not reserve screen space.
• Clicking a dropdown inside a popover, such as the schedule in the Night Light applet, no longer closes the popover.
• The panel no longer crashes at startup when a panel has no stored position (issue #1001).
• A newly created panel now saves its position right away, so it is not lost if your session ends shortly after creating it.
• A panel no longer moves off your primary monitor after changing its edge.

#Bluetooth Applet

Budgie Control Center 2.1.1 removed its Bluetooth panel, which broke the settings button in the Bluetooth applet. The button now opens the first of these that is installed:

1. Bluejay
2. Blueman
3. Budgie Control Center

#Crystal Dock

• The wallpaper border workaround can now handle JPEG XL wallpapers on distributions whose ImageMagick lacks JPEG XL support, by building Budgie with GraphicsMagick instead (issue #988).
• Changing a Crystal Dock setting no longer regenerates your wallpaper twice (issue #945).
• Restarting budgie-daemon no longer leaves old swaybg processes running.

#VMware

The mouse pointer is visible again in VMware virtual machines. The labwc session now sets WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS when it detects VMware's virtual GPU, as it already did for virgl (issue #1037).

#Qt Applications

Older Qt applications and AppImages without Wayland support can launch again. When QT_QPA_PLATFORM is not already set, the labwc session now sets it to wayland;xcb, so Qt falls back to XWayland.

#Packaging Changes

#New Build Option

graphics-lib chooses the library budgie-daemon uses to convert wallpapers for the Crystal Dock workaround:

• imagemagick (default) uses ImageMagick 7's magick.
• graphicsmagick uses gm convert.

#Settings

• org.buddiesofbudgie.budgie-locker is a new schema with a locker-choice key. Distributions shipping both gtklock and swaylock can override it to set their default.
• com.solus-project.budgie-wm gains dimming-delay, defaulting to 30 seconds, and toggle-panels, defaulting to Super+T.

#Panel Layouts

Applet entries in panel.ini can now use a Module= key, which is preferred over ID= when present. Existing layouts continue to work.

#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
• Joshua Strobl
• 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 10.10.3:

• Budgie Desktop: 20 commits, with 3,046 lines added and 1,846 removed across 45 files.

---