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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.
Budgie 10.9 Released
JS
Joshua Strobl

January 28, 2024

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. 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 and support for various Wayland protocols (e.g. wlr foreign toplevel management). 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" 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: 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.
Warning
Note for packagers: You may wish to reference Fedora's packaging 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.

#Use of budgie-session

Budgie 10.9 takes into use 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.
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!

#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:
Supporting The Project

Did you know that you can financially support the Buddies of Budgie project? Buddies of Budgie was founded to provide a home for Budgie Desktop and your financial contribution can go a long way to supporting our goals for development, providing opportunities for financial compensation, leveraging no-compromise Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery systems for Budgie 11 development, and more.