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| 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.
More than meets the eye.
Version 10.5 was recently released. It is the new face of Solus 4 and Ubuntu Budgie 19.04.
After many many months of tiny bug fixes a long awaited major update to this desktop was in order.
Honestly it was very annoying that this modern DE with a rather simple aesthetic and controls was essentially dead in the water for this long but it was worth the wait.
First off, I have to say I'm using Ubuntu Budgie 19.04; there was no major design change, aside from a new theme and a few other small changes it still looks a lot like 10.4. However, those small changes at the surface have proven to be major underground improvements to the stability and usability of the new upgrade. No longer do I see applets skipping the panels like rabbits running around during mating season after every login, theming seems to be so much better integrated with the typical Budgie panel, every applet available feels completely integrated to the desktop itself.
The GNOME 3.32 update definitely made things snappier and more stable. That's how it felt in Fedora GNOME 30 and even more so in Ubuntu Budgie 19.04.
The little things.
As I said, things don't look that different but nothing looks or feels worse. The available applets are now fully uniform with each other, the spacing between them seems to have improved drastically making for a neater Desktop.
On Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 the Nautilus file manager was replaced with Nemo, the Cinnamon file manager, probably the best modern file manager in the Linux community, and desktop icons are enabled.
Unity lovers, pay attention.
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| Once hated, now mourned. |
During my time with GNOME shell (GS) on Manjaro and Fedora for the past couple years I saw a lot of extensions to make the shell look and behave similar to the infamous Unity DE.
**** that, if you're willing to stick to the GNOME shell while Cinnamon and even Plasma are better equipped from the start, taking a look at Budgie is just a tiny step.
I'll be the first person to admit that I love the Unity layout and that I to tried to make the shell more like it. However, that was only because Budgie was still in its 10.3 and 10.4 days. Now, I don't want to ever use GS again.
Don't stick to a dying desktop and try to patch things up, Budgie is here, it's improved and it is worthy of a 5 minute dress change to Unity fashion.
If you want the layout, Budgie is ready, if you want a specific Unity feature then the Applet system of Budgie has proven to be very friendly, once a shell extension now an applet.
I applaud the developers for sticking with a modern yet traditional able desktop despite the headaches Gtk and GNOME might have given.
Perfect Formula achieved.
Every Desktop attends to the needs of some and if some turn to many then it becomes an audible community.
MATE is the refuge to many who still want the stable and customizable platform that was GNOME 2, Cinnamon is a gateway for Windows users, Pantheon is for those who of Mac OS heritage and don't care about tweaking it. That is not to say there's no mixing, the great thing about most of these environments is that they can go beyond their defaults and as such a former Unity user can stick to MATE with the click of a button or a Cinnamon user to get it a bit Mac like.
Budgie is the love child of MATE and GNOME shell in a sandbox, Cinnamon not so much.
Sandbox?
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| My custom settings |
Well, yes. I like a desktop that won't suffer changes because I accidentally dragged the cursor in a wrong area which did occur in MATE but I don't like looking at things with no way of changing them. The Budgie Desktop settings system is the middle ground for me.
It has proven in all major aspects to be a worthy long term Desktop Environment for me to use. It is my perfect formula. Is it yours?
The Good, the Bad, and the Evil.
Everything so far has been a massive BJ wink wink to the developers and their phenomenal work with Budgie. Now it's time to spit.
CSD everywhere, why bro? I like CSD, it's good for some applications with some purposes but I don't get it why it has to be in places it doesn't belong. The GNOME settings app? Understandable. Web browser? I get it, makes sense. The Budgie desktop settings app? BS, CSD is useless and a waste of space, it has nothing in it, only window control buttons and the name, things the classic title bar did perfectly fine. Even the Additional drivers application on Ubuntu could get better use out of CSD's but it is not.
I was locked out of any panel functionality for as long as the command window was open in autostart options of Budgie Desktop settings.
Still having to rely on gnome-tweaks to change a couple things, mainly the "disable trackpad while typing" option.
I almost forgot. Why is the Battery, Sound, and Bluetooth indicator as a single applet? In the beginning I understood, it was putting everything under the rug while other things had priority but it has been this way since the desktop's inception. Good thing that the Wire/Wireless Network applet is now it's own thing, with time I hope the other thing get their individual applets.
And now to the evil. At least it's not Microsoft. LoL
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