Recently, Joshua Strobl, the lead developer of the Budgie Desktop project, shared his ambitious roadmap for the project’s progress in 2024. Hot on the heels of this announcement, we’re excited to see the release of Budgie 10.9, arriving in just over five months after the 10.8 update. Let’s dive in and explore the new features and improvements it offers.
Budgie 10.9 Desktop: A Leap Forward
At the forefront of Budgie 10.9 is the wholly redesigned Bluetooth applet. This revamped feature lets users directly connect or disconnect paired Bluetooth devices, displays battery life indicators, and facilitates file transfers to Bluetooth devices.
In light of this, the Budgie team has discarded the gnome-bluetooth library based on older technologies. Instead, they have opted for direct communication with BlueZ and UPower over D-Bus APIs, aiming to streamline functionality and simplify long-term maintenance.
This architectural change boosts performance and allows some distributions to eliminate the outdated gnome-bluetooth from their repositories.
Another groundbreaking development in Budgie 10.9 is its initial steps towards Wayland support, marking a significant transition from the X11 windowing system.
The team has integrated libxfce4windowing, an abstraction library developed by Xfce, to ensure compatibility with Wayland. This library offers a windowing-system-independent approach and supports both X11 and Wayland protocols.
Although the integration of libxfce4windowing is in its early stages, it has already facilitated the porting of several Budgie components, like the Show Desktop applet, TabSwitcher, and Workspace applet. Particularly noteworthy is the complete rewrite of the TabSwitcher, enhancing its efficiency and user experience.
Lastly, Budgie 10.9 also introduces budgie-session, a session manager forked from GNOME Session 44.x. This component is designed to provide a stable session management solution for Budgie 10.x, retaining crucial X11-related session code and offering ConsoleKit support for BSD systems.
Refer to the Buddies Of Budgie’s blog announcement for detailed information about all changes. As always, users of rolling release Linux distros, such as Arch, Void, openSUSE Tumbleweed, etc., will be among the first to get the updated desktop environment in their repositories in the coming days.
