Joshua Strobl, the key developer of the Budgie desktop, announced his departure from the Core Team of the Solus project and has stepped down as the leader responsible for developer engagement and user interface development (Experience Lead). Beatrice/Bryan Meyers, who oversees the technical aspects of Solus, assured that the distribution development will continue and an announcement regarding changes in the project structure and team restructuring will be made soon.
In turn, Joshua Strobl explained that he intends to join the development of the new distribution SerpentOS, which the original creator of the Solus project has also switched to. Thus, the old Solus team will rally around the SerpentOS project. Joshua is also not giving up on plans to migrate the Budgie desktop environment from GTK to EFL libraries and intends to dedicate more time to Budgie development. Moreover, he plans to create a separate organization to oversee the development of the Budgie desktop environment and involve community members interested in Budgie, such as Ubuntu Budgie and Endeavour OS distributions.
As a reason for his departure, Joshua cites a conflict arising from attempts to voice and resolve issues hindering the promotion of changes in Solus, both from direct project participants and from interested parties in the community. Joshua does not disclose the details of the conflict to avoid airing dirty laundry. It is mentioned only that all his attempts to change the situation and improve collaboration with the community were rejected and none of the voiced problems were resolved.
It is worth noting that the Solus Linux distribution is not based on packages from other distributions and follows a hybrid development model, according to which significant releases with new technologies and major improvements are periodically released, while between significant releases, the distribution evolves using a rolling update model for packages. The package manager eopkg (a fork of PiSi from Pardus Linux) is used for package management.
Budgie desktop is based on GNOME technologies but uses its own implementations of GNOME Shell, panels, applets, and a notification output system. For window management, Budgie employs the Budgie Window Manager (BWM), which is an enhanced modification of the base Mutter plugin. The core of Budgie consists of a panel that operates similarly to traditional desktop panels. All panel elements are applets, allowing for flexible configuration of content, changing placement, and substituting implementations of core panel elements to personal preference.
Source: opennet.ru
