[JoshStrobl]

Long time lurker, had to create an account to post about this though. Hey folks!

"Budgie is based on GTK and the GNOME Shell."

To clarify, Budgie is NOT based on GNOME Shell. Budgie uses gnome-settings-daemon, GTK, and Mutter. It's written with GTK, C, and Vala, whereas GNOME Shell is written in C, St, and JavaScript. Budgie 11 isn't going to use any GNOME applications, its settings daemon, or Mutter. May not even use GTK (but rather EFL).

"originally developed for the distro called Solus"

It is still developed for Solus primarily.

"Another nice feature is the extensions that are baked into the Budgie Extras app, shipped together with the desktop."

This is part of the Ubuntu Budgie experience, not Budgie itself.

"These extensions are all developed by the maintainers of the desktop environment, so breakage is not really expected."

As the developer of Budgie, no these are not all developed by the maintainers. Many of them are developed by Ubuntu Budgie, whereas I use and develop on Solus. Breakage is to be expected and has occurred in the past, leading me to have to triage these issues filed against proper upstream rather than Ubuntu Budgie's extras repo.

"One of these extensions is a global menu that works wonderfully, and supports all my applications"

This is not one which is developed by us (Solus).

"The print screen keyboard shortcuts known from GNOME don't work by default"

Works under Solus.

[thastings]

I am sorry about the inaccurate statements made, they have been fixed according to your points. Many thanks to the Budgie and Solus team for the great desktop experience!

[JoshStrobl]

Thank you for fixing the items raised, much appreciated! Regardless of what operating system you use Budgie under, glad you are enjoying the desktop experience :)

[ragnese]

I haven't followed budgie in a couple of years, but the last I understood about it, it might not be technically accurate to say it's based on GNOME *Shell*, but it's absolutely based on GNOME, the desktop stack. Just to clarify your clarification. :)

Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on the same OS installation- That's how much it shares with GNOME. If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app, it *will* affect your Budgie session.

Maybe you shouldn't say it's "based off of GNOME Shell", but it's probably accurate to say that Budgie is an alternative Shell for GNOME.

Also, I remember a ton of hype for Budgie 11 from years ago already. And that was when Ikey was still smashing out code for the project. I even remember Solus devs at the time saying they might never actually do version 11 because they had fixed and worked around some of the issues that they thought they wouldn't be able to in 10.4(?).

So, is Budgie 11 actually going to happen?

[JoshStrobl]

"but it's absolutely based on GNOME, the desktop stack. Just to clarify your clarification. :)"

GNOME Shell is not the same as the rest of the stack.

"Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on the same OS installation"

Yes, it absolutely can. You can use GDM and log in to both.

"If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app, it will affect your Budgie session."

It entirely depends on what settings you change. For displays, that generates the mutter related configurations which are used by Budgie because Budgie uses Mutter. Networking is related to NetworkManager and not GNOME. Notifications is something we intentionally hook into for filtering apps in Raven but can trivially be changed, we even have our own set of exclusions. Search doesn't apply to Budgie, that is specific to GNOME Shell. Applications is primarily oriented towards Flatpak. Most of the screen locker functionality isn't related because we use slick-greeter+lightdm+budgie-screensaver (a fork of gnome-screensaver).

Sound can be independently managed, we do that via Raven for example (which ties into Gvc). Power settings leverage a mix of gnome-related settings and upower. Mouse settings are primarily related to libinput. I could go on.

"Maybe you shouldn't say it's "based off of GNOME Shell", but it's probably accurate to say that Budgie is an alternative Shell for GNOME."

Not really. There are many settings we expose which are not related to GNOME or GNOME Shell at all.

"I even remember Solus devs at the time saying they might never actually do version 11 because they had fixed and worked around some of the issues that they thought they wouldn't be able to in 10.4(?)."

Yes and then Ikey, the project founder, let and I took over in late Budgie 10.4 and my first release was Budgie 10.5. I went back and fixed issues that previously were implied to only be fixable in Budgie 11.

"So, is Budgie 11 actually going to happen?"

Yes however it is not a priority over other aspects of Solus development.

[ragnese]

>> Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on the same OS installation

> Yes, it absolutely can. You can use GDM and log in to both.

>> If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app, it will affect your Budgie session.

> It entirely depends on what settings you change. For displays, that generates the mutter related configurations which are used by Budgie because Budgie uses Mutter. Networking is related to NetworkManager and not GNOME. Notifications is something we intentionally hook into for filtering apps in Raven but can trivially be changed, we even have our own set of exclusions. Search doesn't apply to Budgie, that is specific to GNOME Shell. Applications is primarily oriented towards Flatpak. Most of the screen locker functionality isn't related because we use slick-greeter+lightdm+budgie-screensaver (a fork of gnome-screensaver).

> Sound can be independently managed, we do that via Raven for example (which ties into Gvc). Power settings leverage a mix of gnome-related settings and upower. Mouse settings are primarily related to libinput. I could go on.

This is exactly my point. Of course you literally can install Budgie and GNOME Shell next to each other. But the very fact that they step on each others' toes is what I meant when I said "comfortably".

The fact that you basically have to guess what settings will affect the other DE is my point. It also happens to some extent with all DEs- you have to have an intuition for what settings are "system" settings and which are "desktop" settings. But I remember being frustrated in particular that some settings, especially with regard to Mutter, affected the other DE. Neither desktop's settings actually refer to Mutter explicitly, so how is a user supposed to know that changing the window decorations or the double-click-titlebar behavior is going to transfer? I also vaguely remember some settings being exposed in one DE's settings app, but not the other's, but that setting actually having an effect across both (likely Mutter and Gnome Tweaks, if I had to guess).

I'm just saying- I recommend not running both Budgie and GNOME Shell.

[rkangel]

Do I understand from a quick Google that you don't support Wayland (or at least Solus doesn't)? If you're using mutter you should presumably have the core of the capability available I believe?

I use Fedora and one of the big reasons is Wayland. I understand there are some usecases for which it doesn't work well for people and that's exactly why I think it is important to use it as much as possible to help get those ironed out. We need to move on from X.

[JoshStrobl]

"Do I understand from a quick Google that you don't support Wayland (or at least Solus doesn't)? If you're using mutter you should presumably have the core of the capability available I believe?"

At this time, we do not support Wayland, that is correct. We leverage a fair few X11-specific APIs and include support for XEmbed-based system tray icons (you would have to pry system tray icons from my cold dead hands :D). Not saying it won't ever be supported, but that wouldn't be addressed until we move to our own window manager at the very least.

[cycloptic]

There are numerous serious usability issues with the XEmbed tray icons [0], even if you stay on X11 you will eventually want to switch over to the StatusNotifier API [1]. This is supported by KDE, Ubuntu's Appindicator, and I believe XFCE now too. Thanks for your hard work in Budgie BTW.

[0]: https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/system-tray-i...

[1]: https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNotifierIt...

[schmorptron]

Hey, this is great insight! I've been thinking about trying solus, and one thing that's great is that it seems to support flatpaks well. Do you think that these types of universal packages will have a large impact on less well known distributions being adopted more in the future as the need to have everything users want packaged for it is reduced significantly?

[solarkraft]

Budgie looks cool, but I've personally stopped dealing with the unmaintained legacy complexity stuff of X.

What are Budgie's Wayland plans and how are they influencing/influenced by the switch from Mutter? What other reasons are there to switch?

[longstation]

Too late to the party, but just want to mention Enlightenment DE (a nice DE also worth trying) since you mentioned EFL.