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.


## 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


# 2022

The new life of a Phoenix comes from the ashes of its predecessors. Budgie Desktop is similar in this regard, with its new life and new organization coming from its separation from the Solus project almost exactly one year ago.

This "rebirth" provided the opportunity to:

1.  Shift our ways of thinking from being product-oriented with development and integration that was more aligned with that of Solus, to one which is platform-oriented and is aligned with our desired adoption of open standards and extensibility for all consumers of Budgie Desktop.
2.  Onboard more contributors from a diverse set of organizations, from Ubuntu Budgie to Arch, EndeavourOS, Ultramarine, and more.
3.  Define as an organization our objectives for 10.x and 11.x, as well as what an "end" for 10.x would look like.
4.  Build on points 2 & 3 by defining our "Core Values" and ways of working as an organization that guide us on the right path for our community and to achieving our goals. These Core Values being: Independence, Transparency, User-centric.

Although there are always improvements to be made, such as around community engagement and communication, 2022 has really been the year of foundation building for our community and organization. It has been rewarding to see it grow over the course of the year, with new people chatting away in our Matrix space*,* folks dropping in during our regular development "stand-ups", and endless amounts of feedback in our development room on various features and functionality that has either influenced the work gone into 10.7 or providing more for us to be mindful of going into 11 and beyond. Budgie Desktop development is never been more diverse and full of optimism.

## A Wealth of Releases

### Budgie Desktop

Within the span of 2022, Budgie Desktop has received **five** new releases, starting with the 10.6 series release and four "patch" releases. For context, the five releases before 10.6 happened over the timespan of **2017 to 2021**. Most of those releases were done simultaneously to those of Solus or around the time of GNOME stack upgrades in Solus, so moving away from that effectively being the release cadence to one which is not associated with the release of any specific operating system or its upgrades has been beneficial to the Budgie community as a whole.

While there are too many bug fixes in the 10.6 series to list, I would like to highlight some of the major improvements Budgie 10.6 series has seen through 2022.

##### Budgie Panel

Budgie Panel and many of its applets saw:

- Rewrite initial applet layout to prevent position desync.
- Reset IconTasklist buttons if group updated while pinned. This fixes an issue where pinned LibreOffice buttons would no longer appear when launching its instance.
- Fix math for calculating right panel strut. This fixes an issue where a right-positioned panel could overlap with windows.
- Removed delay when opening apps in IconTasklist. This was introduced in our application tracking system in an attempt to fix Chrome profile manager closing sequence but ended up breaking some other apps (such as Steam) closing sequence.
- Increase size and density of workspaces in workspace applet.
- [Introduced support](https://youtu.be/ezOXzmuo8v8?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) for setting the item size multiplier in the Workspace Applet, providing users more flexibility on the size of the applet and how many desired items appear for each Workspace at once.
- Fix crash in Clock Applet when attempting to set a custom timezone.

##### Internal Theme and Panel Refinements

Budgie Desktop 10.6 saw improvements to its current internal theming and panels. Some aspects included:

- Border radiuses on most dialogs, Raven Widgets, Panel Popover content.
- Unified color scheme for widgets within the panel.
- Removing of "stylized end regions" due to inconsistencies across GTK themes and internal theme.
- Precise battery levels icons are now used when supported by the icon theme. This means the icon will get updated on 10% intervals.
- Updated the default panel configuration to reflect the one that was used in Solus via its Budgie Desktop Branding package. This change better communicates our expectation for the default Budgie experience. Prior to this change, there were large inconsistencies such as panel location and widgets, between distributors such as Arch Linux and other consumers like Solus.

##### Notification System Rewrite

Our Notification Server saw a rewrite and move out of Raven, enabling it to be utilized in other Budgie components, as well as providing the opportunity to fix long-standing issues and improvements in the popups themselves. Some highlights:

- We now use the GTK.Stack for Notification popup bodies, providing a better way to reflect notification body content.
- We now properly utilize the Notification's appinfo, fixing issues where Notification Groups could present the wrong name (such as with Evolution and its calendar events).
- Clicking on a Notification Popup will now trigger the default action instead of adding a button for the default action.

### Budgie Control Center

This year saw the forking of GNOME Control Center into Budgie Control Center, which offers various value-add such as:

- Raven keybind support
- Improved fractional scaling support when supported by the operating system (requires the use of a patched Mutter with xrandr functionality)
- A re-organization of functionality and removal of GNOME Shell-specific functions
- Support for distribution logos so operating systems would not be required to patch our control center like they do with GNOME Control Center in order to display their branding instead of the GNOME logo. We also have special handling for light / dark theme variants for logos.
- Updated details with Budgie Desktop versioning

This work has been spearheaded by David Mohammed aka fossfreedom, from the Ubuntu Budgie team, with five releases of Budgie Control Center throughout the year.

### Budgie Screensaver

[Budgie Screensaver](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-screensaver?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) development picked up steam thanks to Campbell Jones, with four new releases in 2022. Budgie Screensaver is a **very old fork** of GNOME Screensaver, originally intended to be a drop-in replacement with most patches backported from Ubuntu, so it is great to see quality of life improvments being made and standards being improved. Budgie Screensaver has been:

- Ported over to Meson
- Received fixes for compiling under musl, system language changing, and input grabbing (now using GdkSeat)
- Had much needed cleanup around compiler warnings

### Budgie Desktop View

[Budgie Desktop View](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop-view?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) saw its 1.2 bug fix release this year as well. This fixed launching with some file types, updated to our menu option to open "System Settings" (now Budgie Control Center), as well as a renaming of our settings schemas to use the reverse DNS naming for Buddies of Budgie instead of Solus.

## Budgie 10.7 Development

Development of Budgie 10.7 has been underway and while it was originally the goal to release it within 2022, the extra time huddled in its nest has provided room for more features and polish to make its way into what will be another big release for Budgie 10. While I could not possibly touch on all the great work that has been done on this upcoming release, here are some highlights of what we know is getting into the release already.

### Budgie Menu Design and Architecture Improvements

![](/images/blog/2023/01/StateOfTheBudgie_July2022.jpg)

Budgie Menu has been improved for Budgie 10.7. I covered some of this in a past State of the Budgie, but I'll recap some of it. With the new Budgie Menu, you will have:

1.  Access to a personal user menu which has quick XDG directory access. This feature enables you to open up a file manager (or technically whatever your inode/directory handler is) directly to folders like Home, Documents, Music, etc. This follows the [XDG Base Directory Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)_._
2.  Access to a power menu with all the options you would come to expect such as suspend, hibernate, logout, and power off. This may change by the time Budgie 10.7 is released as there is more work being done on improving the UX across Budgie Desktop for power menus.
3.  Capability for an application to launch on a specific GPU if [switcheroo-control](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/switcheroo-control/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is installed when PrefersNonDefaultGPU is set to true for a given desktop file. This is handy for hybrid graphics / dual GPU scenarios.
4.  Quick access to Budgie Control Center and Budgie Desktop Settings.
5.  An option via the Budgie Menu settings in Budgie Desktop Settings to show Budgie Control Center settings items (such as bluetooth, sound, power) in the applications list. You will always be able to search for these items regardless of the option being enabled though, so you can have less clutter in your menu while still having quick access to various settings panels.

### Run Dialog Refactor and Improvements

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

Budgie Run Dialog has received considerable improvements for 10.7.

- Budgie Run Dialog now leverages our new application indexer that is used for Budgie Menu to find and sort applications. This provides a predictable fuzzy search experience across both of them and enables the same setting of GPU profiles during application launching.
- Improvements around run dialog sizing so it's calculated on the workarea of the monitor it is launching on.
- Improvements centered on styling such as label for name and application descriptions being split in launcher buttons.

### New Screenshot Functionality

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

Budgie Desktop 10.7 will introduce a new Budgie Screenshot application, with support for the screen, window and selection capture! You will no longer need a separate screenshot application such as gnome-screenshot for screenshotting under Budgie Desktop, with the keybinds now defaulting to invoking our screenshot functionality instead.

## New Or Improved In More Places

Since the separation of Budgie Desktop from Solus, more attention has been put into Budgie Desktop's availability and the quality of its availability across various operating systems.

- Campbell Jones aka serebit is now an Arch Linux Trusted User, officially maintaining Budgie Desktop and its components under Arch Linux.
- Budgie Desktop under EndeavourOS has seen polishing by its team and we are fortunate to have them in our community.
- Budgie Desktop made its way into the official repository of Fedora with the release of Fedora 37. I have also proposed the creation of a [Fedora Budgie Spin](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FedoraBudgie?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), providing another way of getting an out-of-the-box Budgie experience.
- We have seen recent community efforts on Budgie Desktop under nixOS as well as OpenBSD. Hopefully those will evolve in 2023!

## 2023

While 2022's theme has turned out to be an exercise in our "Independence" value, with a bigger focus on tackling various parts of the foundation of Budgie and developing a consistent and predictable set of components around it, it is my goal for Buddies of Budgie and Budgie Desktop for 2023 to be its exercise in **both** our "User-centric" value from work done on 10.x and "Transparency" through more communication and work on 11 (_spoilers_).

Putting aside the usual caveat of these items being: none of it is finalized, everything is subject to change based on discoveries throughout the development / iteration process, collaboration and feedback from team members, and no accounting for any surprises 2023 might have in store for us – you get the point – here are _my_ initial thoughts on what we should _strive for_ in 2023.

## Q1

For Q1 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Release of Budgie 10.7 and at the very least a 10.7.1 for bug fixes.
- Release of new budgie-backgrounds, providing a rich set of backgrounds for Budgie users to choose from alongside any from their OS of choice, whether that be: modern architecture, scenery, space, abstract digital art, or of course pictures of cute animals. Gotta have cute animals.
- Release of Buddies of Budgie site and Docusaurus for documentation, continued improvements on both fronts. These properties will help to define Budgie Desktop and our organization, communicate our organization values, detail our current roadmap, document developer APIs and creation of panel and Raven widgets, document user features, and more.
- Beginning development of 10.8, with current slated items being around a new StatusNotifier-oriented system tray, streamlining theme selection, a new network indicator, and improvements around the "legacy" tasklist.
- Producing a unified and up-to-date schedule of the upcoming freeze and release dates of non-rolling release operating systems that ship Budgie Desktop in their repositories, to help guide the organization in its iteration of Budgie Desktop and maximize the chance of new features and fixes being shipped in them. That leads to a better experience for us developing and maintaining Budgie Desktop but more importantly a better experience for all of our users.

## Q2

For Q2 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Release of Budgie 10.8
- Review of defined project items for 10.x that should make its way into a 10.9 release

Alongside those two items, I will be starting work on speccing out the ["Protocol buffers"](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) for the Budgie 11.x Daemon and creating POCs (proof of concept) in Rust for review as RFCs (request for comment). These POCs will serve to influence the architectural design or be the foundational work for Budgie 11.

## Q3

For Q3 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Release of at least one Budgie 10.8 "patch" release e.g. 10.8.1
- Work on 10.9 items such as improved Bluetooth support and new Raven widgets using the new Raven APIs coming in 10.7.
- Active experimenting with wlroots and smithay to determine the most optimal path for Budgie 11 (e.g. wlroots + C or smithay for Rust)
- Start implementation of at least Bluetooth (bluez) and power management (upower) in new 11.x budgie-daemon.

### Q4

For Q4 of 2023, the goals at minimum should be:

- Finish Bluetooth (bluez) and power management (upower) implementations in new daemon.
- RFC Budgie Configuration (TOML file-based serializing, deserializing, setting migrations, per-panel / per-applet configuration, etc.)
- Continue our experiments with Wayland compositors and protocols, informing us on how we want to spec out the separation of concerns for Budgie WM, Budgie Daemon, and responsibilities of various graphical components.

---

Realistically based on the current bandwidth and size of the team, I believe the above items are achievable, many of them involve lots of tinkering and maybe some late night cups of coffee or tea. There are some items not touched on for specific quarters that might be nice to see, such as an EFL or iced port of Budgie Desktop View, or abstracting out application tracking into a Rust-based library around the timeframe of Q3 / Q4 that can be used in both current Budgie 10 and future 11.

# Summary

I hope this State of the Budgie provided a good summary of the work that the Buddies of Budgie organization and broader Budgie community has invested in 2022 and goals for 2023. At the very least, it should serve as a good foundation to build on and provide a clear picture on where Budgie Desktop is going this year: Budgie 10.x will receive new features, QoL improvements, and fixes. Budgie 11 development will be underway.

On a personal level, it has been heartwarming to see the community growth and evolution of Budgie Desktop over the last year. Forking a well-known project into a completely separate organization is not always easy but I believe that we have done well to not only start it off on the right footing, but also instill confidence in our community that Budgie Desktop has a brighter future because of it. I look forward to what we all can accomplish together in 2023 together. ❤️

<OCCallout />


State of the Budgie: 2022 In Review and Goals for 2023


This is the State of the Budgie for July 2022, covering the latest happenings in the month of July!

## Budgie 10.6.2

[Budgie 10.6.2](budgie-10-6-2-released/) was released a few weeks back, resolving issues in our daemon, panel, and panel widgets. This was the second release of the 10.6 series and the third release already with Budgie Desktop being under the Buddies of Budgie organization, so I am quite happy with the momentum thus far and it is certainly an improvement over the last few years.

## Budgie 10.7 Development

Budgie 10 continues to be our primary focus as we work on various re-architectures of the desktop, from moving more business logic from widgets to the daemon, to providing major quality-of-life improvements, with 10.7 being the next 10 series release.

### Budgie Menu

One of the items we will be shipping in Budgie 10.7 is a new Budgie Menu. This new Budgie Menu provides improvements to both its user experience as well as its architecture. Since UX improvements are more eye-catching, we will start with that first.

![](/images/blog/2022/08/StateOfTheBudgie_July2022-1.jpg)

As you can see in the featured image, Budgie Menu in many ways is quite similar to what it was before, with the key differences being at the bottom of the menu. With the new Budgie Menu, you will have:

1.  Access to a personal user menu which has quick XDG directory access. This feature enables you to open up a file manager (or technically whatever your inode/directory handler is) directly to folders like Home, Documents, Music, etc. This follows the [XDG Base Directory Specification](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), so if you have for example a different path set for Music (_or your system locale is not English_) that will be respected. Folders which do not exist will be automatically hidden, so the menu will only show items which are relevant to you.
2.  Access to a power menu with all the options you would come to expect such as suspend, hibernate, logout, and power off. This will be the preferred default way of performing these operations going forward, centralizing this functionality where many users expect, as opposed to being put into the User Indicator widget. The User Indicator widget will still be around so various operating systems which ship Budgie Desktop can have the choice to retain the previous layouts or complement it with their own menu, but the default Budgie Desktop experience will have not have the User Indicator added by default.
3.  Capability for an application to launch on a specific GPU if [switcheroo-control](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/switcheroo-control/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) is installed when PrefersNonDefaultGPU is set to true for a given desktop file. This is handy for hybrid graphics / dual GPU scenarios.
4.  Quick access to Budgie Control Center and Budgie Desktop Settings.
5.  An option via the Budgie Menu settings in Budgie Desktop Settings to show Budgie Control Center settings items (such as bluetooth, sound, power) in the applications list. You will always be able to search for these items regardless of the option being enabled though, so you can have less clutter in your menu while still having quick access to various settings panels.

![](/images/blog/2022/08/relevancysearch-1.jpg)

This fancier user experience is powered by a more robust architecture, starting with a new application indexer in our daemon that replaces our previous use of libgnome-menus. This library tended to create some inconsistent results when it came to application indexing and a common one was apps not showing up after installation, requiring the user to restart budgie-panel or relog for it to trigger properly. Our indexer has more consistent behavior and even works with user created custom menus.

Alongside this, we have a new "relevancy service" that is leveraged in Budgie Menu and is planned to be leveraged in a new Budgie Run Dialog. This relevancy service is used for search and keep track of how each application is relevant to a given search term. This code was inspired by work done on Brisk Menu and takes into account the application name, "generic name" of an app (like "text editor"), description, executable, and keywords. Finding apps should get much easier starting in Budgie 10.7!

## Packaging Efforts

An important part of the user journey is making it as effortless as possible to start using Budgie Desktop, no matter what Linux-based operating system the user wants to use. In the month of July, we have made headway on improving the Budgie Desktop experience across two major operating systems: Arch Linux and Fedora.

### Arch Linux

Budgie Desktop has been available via the Arch Linux repository for years, providing the opportunity for users to get the latest of their favorite desktop environment alongside the latest of their favorite applications. With all the changes happening in the Budgie ecosystem since the beginning of this year, we noticed that some of them were not making their way into the official Arch repositories.

For example, Budgie Control Center is a mandatory component and is only available in the [AUR](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/budgie-control-center?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). This makes it less discoverable to Budgie users, does not get automatically pulled in as part of the installation, and as a result the user may be left wondering what control center they should use. In the past, Budgie Desktop has been able to leverage GNOME Control Center due to many similarities, however as the GNOME team has been working to expose more GNOME Shell capabilities via GNOME Control Center, this has resulted in a widening set of issues when used under Budgie. Specific panels that would attempt to get GNOME Shell settings would cause segfaults and due to panel restoration in GNOME Control Center, it would always attempt to load that segfaulting panel at next launch and require the end user to launch a specific panel from the terminal to get back into a usable GNOME Control Center.

It was for this reason and the desire to streamline the control center experience that we forked GNOME Control Center into Budgie Control Center and began shipping it as part of the 10.6+ experience. As there has not been a dedicated Budgie maintainer under Arch in the recent past (rather solely being done in the spare time of various Arch contributors), these new changes under the new org, coupled with new components, did not get fully incorporated into the repos, which has resulted in a sub-optimal experience for users under Arch.

Campbell Jones, aka serebit, is a multi-year contributor to Budgie Desktop, a team member in the Buddies of Budgie organization, and an avid Arch Linux users. Last month, he applied to become an Arch Trusted User, which would enable him to support Budgie Desktop on Arch Linux in an official capacity, providing our users on Arch an excellent experience, and it is our hope that he will be approved this month!

### Fedora

Alongside efforts to improve support in Arch Linux, we have been working to support Budgie Desktop officially in Fedora. Fedora is the only major operating system without Budgie in its official repos and as someone that really enjoys the Fedora experience as a user, developer, and server admin (having used Fedora Server for years), it made perfect sense to not only bring Budgie Desktop to Fedora but also strive to get an official spin of Fedora with Budgie as well.

Currently all packages except for budgie-desktop itself (budgie-control-center, budgie-desktop-view, and budgie-screensaver) are in Fedora 37 (current rawhide) and the Budgie Desktop package is currently awaiting review. My personal goal is to get it landed in rawhide in August and begin exploring 36 backporting as well as spin creation!

<OCCallout />


State of the Budgie: July 2022

State of the Budgie: May 2022


Buddies of Budgie was founded to provide a home for the [Budgie Desktop](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), an open source modern desktop environment built to provide you immediate access to the things you need, and keep out of the way when you need it to most.

When I founded Buddies of Budgie after my departure from the Solus team, I made it my immediate goals to:

1.  Perform outreach and change the relationship of "downstreams" like Ubuntu Budgie into equal partners in the development and planning of the Budgie Desktop.
2.  Re-ignite Budgie 10 development and start more active discussions on Budgie 11.
3.  Establish clear processes for providing feedback, engaging in discussions, fostering a healthy community, and more.
4.  Ensure transparency into the organization and Budgie itself, allowing individuals to get more easily involved in its development as well as understand where we are as a project in pursuing goals.

As a mini "State of the Budgie" for April 2022, here is what has been done so far and what is coming up in the near future!

## Outreach and Engagement with Consumers of Budgie

My first priority was reaching out to individuals and "downstreams" of Budgie (henceforth "consumers") about getting involved in the new development efforts, given there may have been previously some reluctance with it having been under the Solus umbrella. This outreach was through multiple means, such as email, social networks, and forum posts:

Here are some public examples:

- [EndeavourOS Forum](https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/budgie-main-dev-leaves-solus/22104/22?u=joshstrobl&ref=blog.buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [Ubuntu Budgie Forum](https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org/t/buddies-of-budgie/5617?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

To facilitate this engagement with these consumers as well as just your average Budgie user, I created a [Matrix Space](https://matrix.to/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org#/#buddies-of-budgie:matrix.org) to have off-topic, support, and development discussions. This has proven useful in our active collaboration efforts.

## Financially Supporting Budgie Development: OpenCollective and Swag

In the past, there was no direct way to financially support the development of Budgie Desktop and the infrastructure that enables its continued development. We are quite fortunate to have the Open Source Collective offer its fiscal hosting and non-profit functions for open source projects and that includes Buddies of Budgie, via [our OpenCollective](https://opencollective.com/buddies-of-budgie?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org).

Thanks to the support of backers on our OpenCollective, we have already been able to reimburse 250 USD for various development items, such as fixing a long-standing issue with icon scaling in the IconTasklist applet, as well as a massive re-architecture and numerous improvements to Budgie Menu. If you would like to help support our development of Budgie Desktop financially, the opportunity is available and we would greatly appreciate the support.

If you are interested in getting some nice Budgie swag, the margins go directly to our OpenCollective on a monthly basis. We have t-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, hoodies, polos, stickers, and more! You can check it out on our European Spreadshirt and North American Spreadshirt shops!

- [Europe](https://buddies-of-budgie.myspreadshop.net/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)
- [North America](https://buddies-of-budgie.myspreadshop.com/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

## Reignite Budgie 10 Development and Discussions on Budgie 11

Budgie development takes place on our dedicated [GitHub organization](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org), with hard forks of Budgie Desktop, Budgie Desktop View, and budgie-screensaver. We have a [discussion forum](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/discussions?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) on the Budgie Desktop repository to gather feedback and ideas, which previously were in the forums of individual operating systems. I kick-started discussion around Budgie 10 development through the [Moving Forward](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/discussions/3?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) and [Making Budgie 10 Fly Again](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/discussions/2?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) posts, as well as numerous issues that served as focal points on identified problems with Budgie 10.x.

Translations are done through our [Transifex](https://www.transifex.com/buddiesofbudgie/budgie-10/dashboard/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) rather than requiring the infrastructure of a specific operating system. Work has also been underway on a [Buddies of Budgie site.](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/site?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org)

In terms of releases, we have already had two releases of Budgie Desktop, 10.6 and 10.6.1. 🎉🎉🎉 10.6 incorporated a considerable rewrite of both our IconTasklist and application tracking, as well as a new notification server. 10.6.1 featured numerous bug fixes. When it comes to Budgie 10.7, we are already well underway in introducing a new Budgie Menu with even more re-architecture, as well as a new internal theme. So we are pretty happy with the current situation in the development of Budgie 10.x.

David Mohammed a.k.a fossfreedom from the [Ubuntu Budgie](https://ubuntubudgie.org/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) project has been doing an absolutely stellar job in our fork of GNOME Control Center, which is [Budgie Control Center](https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-control-center/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). This new control center will serve Budgie 10.x users and provide us more separation from GNOME.

All of this put together goes to show our commitment as a community in the development of Budgie 10 until Budgie 11 is ready for general availability.

Discussions around Budgie 11 are still in their early days, however as we have looked more at the re-architecture of Budgie 10.x this has also been done with the mindset of serving as a playground for new ideas to pursue for 11, and these discussions have occurred while we work on these re-architectures. We have a stronger sense of the identity of Budgie 11 and our goals will be further expanded in greater detail in our upcoming workshops.

## Upcoming Workshops

This brings us to goals 3 and 4. To re-iterate those goals:

3.  Establish clear processes for providing feedback, engaging in discussions, fostering a healthy community, and more.
4.  Ensure transparency into the organization and Budgie itself, allowing individuals to get more easily involved in its development as well as understand where we are as a project in pursuing goals.

We firmly believe in the idea of continuous improvement, whether that is in the ways we work, the ways we communicate, or the ways we address issues. I want to apply the lessons I have learned from my past involvement in Solus and its community to ensure from the start we have clear processes for engagement in our community (such as the adoption of the Code of Conduct I had originally wrote for Solus), transparency whenever possible, and a well-defined identity as an organization.

In the spirit of transparency and community engagement, these discussions are not happening behind closed doors with a small group of individuals. Instead, I will be hosting two public workshops (details below) that will not only delve into a wide-range of non-technical and technical topics, but allow direct involvement from everyone: active contributors to normal Budgie users. These will be livestreamed on my [Twitch](https://twitch.tv/joshstrobl?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) and uploaded to both [my personal YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6PZ02xAkxIv8xdGvld0Gow?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org) as well as the new [Buddies of Budgie channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM3oxUX4ByMbC9_9Xdtaa_Q?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org). Materials from our collaboration, such as our Miro board, will also be accessible.

**Day 1 Workshop will take place on April 30th 1500 UTC - 1800 UTC** and cover the topics of: Core Values of Buddies of Budgie, Community Development and Engagement:

1.  Identifying and Documenting Core Values of the Buddies of Budgie organization.
2.  Community Development and Engagement: Consensus creation & org structure. CoC proposal. How do we facilitate discussion and what avenues should be considered?
3.  Brainstorming resource access and sharing (examples: existing Google Workspace and adding users, Bitwarden Teams Organization for password sharing + Google SSO as SAML, Buffer for social media, DigitalOcean Team). Policies around that.
4.  Brainstorming on how we organize and communicate the above-mentioned information, including on the site.

**Day 2 Workshop will take place on May 1st 1500 UTC - 1800 UTC** and cover the topics of: Purpose Description around development of Budgie 10. High-level objectives for Budgie 11. Transparency in development.

1.  Describing the purpose of the current continued development of Budgie 10 series
2.  High-level objectives we wish to accomplish with Budgie 11.
3.  Brainstorming on how we organize and communicate the above-mentioned information, including on the site. GitHub Project Boards, Trello, etc.? Meta repo for tracking? Public roadmap is personally important, even if it is high-level, has no ETAs, or evolves over time (good!).

I intend on having further workshops, such as a Day 3 on May 7th 1500 UTC - 1800 UTC, though the topic for that is TBD.

These workshops will be summarized in a dedicated blog post as well as through any other agreed-on mediums.

### Getting Involved

We will be using Google Meet to facilitate these discussions. The link to the workshop meets and Miro boards are shared directly with participants through our [Matrix Server](https://matrix.to/?ref=buddiesofbudgie.org#/#buddies-of-budgie:matrix.org) and will also be published in the general channel as well before the workshops start.

## Summary

To summarize the current state of the organization and Budgie Desktop: It is more lively and healthier than ever. We are actively working on ways to build a healthy and well-structured community (the workshops are a result of our intentions in this regard). Budgie 10 series is looking great and we are optimistic about development going into Budgie 11.

From a personal perspective, working on Buddies of Budgie and Budgie Desktop through the new organization has been a breath of fresh air, and I look forward to seeing where we go in the future.

<OCCallout />


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