Budgie developers have shared their main goals for Budgie 11, outlining what users can expect from Preview 1 of the upcoming desktop environment release as they continue working on the new shell and its components. Here are the highlights.
Preview 1 should let users add several panels and place them along any screen edge. The team also hopes to support panels on different monitors without stretching them across screens. Extensions in this preview will include Budgie Menu, IconTasklist, Status Indicator (for battery and volume), System Tray, Raven (Budgie’s side panel interface) trigger for unread notifications, and Clock.
Work on Magpie, Budgie 11’s window management & compositing layer is progressing simultaneously. Planned features include key shortcuts for things like Alt+Tab and tiling, plus better focus handling, which is already in place.
The configuration schema includes appearance settings like auto-hide, dock mode, size, and transparency. It also covers layout options such as which monitor to use, where to place the panel, and where extensions go. Each panel will save its settings in a profile-aware folder in the user’s configuration directory, using unique IDs to keep them separate.
On top of that, developers also fixed issues with KConfig XT’s generated classes by adding manual change detection, so panel views update properly when configuration files change. Right now, configuration files include all default values to make development and testing easier, but the team plans to change this later so only modified values are saved.
There is no release date yet for this Preview 1 version of Budgie 11. It’s worth noting that Budgie 10.10 is also receiving small fixes and improvements, but most of the team’s effort is now focused on building the technical base for Budgie 11’s new shell and component model.
For more information, see the announcement.
