Budgie 10.8 desktop released with plenty of new features

Budgie was about being simple, efficient, modern, and especially distraction-free from all the options to customise unlike Gnome & KDE 😅.
I use both Gnome & KDE and I like them both.
But when I want a simple modern desktop out of the box, and I just want to get my work done, I would go with Budgie.

I love a good sidebar, and also love a simple modern interface, so I thought I would like Budgie. But I tried it on a live usb stick a while back and wound up being turned off by the lack of options. Turned out I guess I was more used to all the options in Plasma than I originally thought.

While I love the concept of Budgie, I think I'll continue to stick with Plasma.

There are plenty of options in Budgie, but they are scattered around in multiple places. For some tweaks you must use dconf too. While I've been using it for a while and got used to it, I think it could use a settings overhaul.

Quoting: AustinBut when I want a simple modern desktop out of the box, and I just want to get my work done, I would go with Budgie.

Just curious: How does Budgie stack up against Xfce for this use-case?

I don't use it but I'm interested in it because it seems to fit the same niche XFCE does, except with Wayland support.

QuoteEventually it will be a full wlroots-based Wayland compositor as they will drop X11 support to go all-in on Wayland.

Very good to hear. More wlroots-based compositors is a good thing. It means we'll have at least one good standard for Wayland compositors...

Quoting: AustinBudgie was about being simple, efficient, modern, and especially distraction-free from all the options to customise unlike Gnome & KDE 😅.

What distractions have you noticed in GNOME? And simple? There's not even an option for slideshow wallpapers in GNOME!

I like the simple interface that is a bit more contemporary then gnome and a bit more modern then Xfce.

Also get decent defaults for the theme for dark mode on a fresh install, unlike KDE. :)

Was very light on resources when I tried it on Solus, but not sure how this compares with Xfce.

If they make the switch to Elementary then it should run even better on old hardware. Could be interesting


Last edited by Craggles086 on 31 August 2023 at 6:07 am UTC

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: AustinBut when I want a simple modern desktop out of the box, and I just want to get my work done, I would go with Budgie.

Just curious: How does Budgie stack up against Xfce for this use-case?

If you want an honest opinion from a long time XFCE user... I moved to Budgie a few years ago. For a while in Xubuntu a lot of things were broken, notably the damned keyboard switcher applet that kept breaking every few years, to then be ignored and not fixed for years at a time. I don't remember what other problems I had, but XFCE was getting neglected badly back then. I tried Budgie, it wasn't instant love, it needed a lot of tweaking, but it was every bit as fast as XFCE and didn't get in my way, just like XFCE. Every once in a while I check the progress on XFCE and hope to get back, but I keep Budgie because it just works, even though its not perfect.

Honestly, I think XFCE's pretty much done, there's little development efforts going on (only a few very dedicated devs who have no way of keeping up with modern desktop development pace). Unless a lot of people decide to work on it, or a lot of funding magically materializes, its not likely to be in any usable state on Wayland soon, and that's probably what is going to kill it.

So, there you have it. In my opinion Budgie is not better than XFCE at all. It just happens to be in a better working state.

Quoting: DrakkerIf you want an honest opinion from a long time XFCE user... I moved to Budgie a few years ago. For a while in Xubuntu a lot of things were broken, notably the damned keyboard switcher applet that kept breaking every few years, to then be ignored and not fixed for years at a time. I don't remember what other problems I had, but XFCE was getting neglected badly back then. I tried Budgie, it wasn't instant love, it needed a lot of tweaking, but it was every bit as fast as XFCE and didn't get in my way, just like XFCE. Every once in a while I check the progress on XFCE and hope to get back, but I keep Budgie because it just works, even though its not perfect.

Honestly, I think XFCE's pretty much done, there's little development efforts going on (only a few very dedicated devs who have no way of keeping up with modern desktop development pace). Unless a lot of people decide to work on it, or a lot of funding magically materializes, its not likely to be in any usable state on Wayland soon, and that's probably what is going to kill it.

So, there you have it. In my opinion Budgie is not better than XFCE at all. It just happens to be in a better working state.

Thanks very, very much - that's exactly the info that I was looking for. (I'm also a long-time Xfce user, currently on Mint Xfce after 15 years on Xubuntu and one year on Kubuntu before that.)

I'll be keeping an eye on Budgie going forward!

What is the status of WLRoots with the proprietary Nvidia drivers?

Fedora always stuffs me up royally here.
Never worked out if it was a Fedora thing or a
WLRoots thing.

And No…
Nouveau Is not an option.

Do we have a matching GTK theme with that or is it just the built-in theme for Raven and the taskbar?