My "Linux" Book Pro

That's it. A Macbook Pro 8.1 from 2011.
It's old but I love it. I was my first and only laptop.
And I have no money.

How does it run?

Fine. It runs fine. Games don't but for web browsing and listening to music it's a great machine. After 8 years the battery is 50-60% of what it once was. In Mac OS X Lion I got 5 hours of really good use, 10 if I was properly stretched wink wink. The screen is 1280x800px and 13' so quality is decent but not great, even back in 2011 but image quality is still better than many mid range laptops.

How does it run with Linux?

With the exception of graphical performance, it runs better in every single way.
Trackpad support is clearly inferior to Mac OS but better than Windows 7 and 8 on this Machine. I do miss some gestures which are "missing" on X.org but enabled and working well on Wayland.

What was it about graphical performance?

Simply put it, the Intel HD 3000 from 2011 came with ~400-512MB of shared VRAM as specified by Mac OS but hardcoded to a minimum of 256MB. Mac OS, due to its hardware integration, controls how much memory is allowed, I've actually got a kext that increased to 2GB and performance is gained but only up to 1-1.5GB which I also experimented with.
On Linux distros there is no hardware access to VRAM sharing so it defaults to 256MB which is ******* bull****. I have 16GB of RAM.



Battery is a bit better than recent Crap OS versions, getting around 2 hours with Linux Kernel 4.18-5.0 and TLP. Manjaro and Fedora are the best at that even with GNOME shell.

Network capabilities depend on the distribution.
Ubuntu and based distributions from 16.04 to 18.04 run the wireless drivers with a simple toggle in "Additional Drivers" if connected via Ethernet, reboot and it's good.
Manjaro worked out of the box.
Fedora was tricky, 29 and 30 run the proprietary amazingly well but installing the drivers requires a few commands and an Ethernet connection.
Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 was weird, recognized the hardware and enabled the drivers by default but it didn't actually do anything, I had to run two commands, reboot and it was done.

Final thoughts

I've beaten it to hell and back but it's like an old VolkSWAGen. They don't make them like they used to.
It's approaching the 10 year mark and I'll be sure to keep it for many more. Maybe get an SSD and some spare parts like monitor assemblies.

Snaps vs Flats vs Good Ol' Apts

To Snap A Flat Or Not?

The time has come, you go into the desktop for the first time on a Linux machine and decide to install software. It comes with Firefox but you decide to use Chrome, as any curious human being you go through the application launcher on your taskbar beforehand see "Software Store" there and click on it. Oh Jolly, it's like Android, just point and click - you said before searching for Chrome. 3 results come up, they all look the same, say the same thing and have the same amount of stars. Oh ****, it's like Android, so many of the same - you thought after you realized this is more like buying pasta. You look down and see different package sizes wink wink. What gives? What do you choose?

List of Small issues throughout Budgie

List of bugs

AppIndicator applet doesn't scale app icons properly if panel is around 37 and smaller in size. Forces panel to increase size if deemed necessary. Spoke with applet maintainer, it's not a bug.

While in the autostart section of Budgie Desktop Settings App, if command/application specification window is open, the panel(s) become inactive, i.e. none of the applets become responsive to any action taken by the user. No workaround has been found by the user yet.

If extra monitors are added or removed the left/right panels stop recognizing the border with top/bottom panels. Login in again fixes the bug until next monitor switch.

Current Global menu, vala-panel-appmenu, version 0.7.1, has a small glitch with Firefox Web Browser and VLC media player. Sub menus initially show a small line until said sub menu is hovered again by cursor. Submitted to gitlab and maintainer thinks it has been corrected in version 0.7.2. Please update current in budgie-extras.

Budgie Desktop in 2019

My setup with a hint of Unity (RIP) on Ubuntu Budgie 19.04

 

The future of Budgie.

 

In the community it seems like Qt based desktops are evolving to such an extent that they might tickle Gtk+ desktops in the the near future.
Qt is still an underdog in the realm of Desktop Environments (DE), KDE's Plasma shows how much you can add and customize your monitor's pixel area while Deepin shows how pretty it can be. No sane middle ground until Budgie 11 was announced.

But...

It won't be. While the original plans were to release Budgie 11 as a Qt based Desktop Environment with heavy GNOME/Gtk+ integration which made many hopeful it would finally bridge the gap of horrible toolkit mixing and increased performance, it seems like the plans have changed for good, Budgie 11 will be a Gtk4 based Desktop Environment.
I hope the absolute best to the developers to carry on with this great desktop into the future.