Joshua Strobl, who recently retired from the Solus distribution and founded the independent organization Buddies Of Budgie, has released plans for further development of the Budgie desktop. The Budgie 10.x branch will continue to evolve towards providing generic, distro-independent components. Including packages with Budgie Desktop, Budgie Control Center, Budgie Desktop View and Budgie Screensaver are offered for inclusion in the Fedora Linux repositories. In the future, it is planned to prepare a separate edition (spin) of Fedora with a Budgie desktop, similar to the Ubuntu Budgie edition.
The Budgie 11 branch will evolve towards separating the layer with the implementation of the main functionality of the desktop and the layer that provides visualization and information output. Such a separation will allow abstracting the code from specific graphical toolkits and libraries, as well as starting to experiment with other models for presenting information and connecting other output systems. For example, it will be possible to start experimenting with the previously planned transition to the set of EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Library) libraries developed by the Enlightenment project.
Other plans and goals for the Budgie 11 branch include:
- Provide primary support for the Wayland protocol while keeping X11 as an option (for NVIDIA graphics card users who may have issues with Wayland support).
- Use of Rust code in libraries and window manager (the main part will remain in C, but Rust will be used for critical areas).
- Full functional identity with Budgie 10 at the level of applets support.
- Provides panel and desktop presets, including GNOME Shell, macOS, Unity, and Windows 11 style panel skins, menus, and layouts. External application launcher interfaces can be connected.
- Providing an interface for switching between applications in the style of GNOME Shell and macOS overview modes.
- Improved support for placement of icons on the desktop, the possibility of arbitrary placement and grouping of icons.
- Improved support for tiled window layouts (horizontal and vertical snaps, 2x2, 1x3, and 3x1 window splits).
- New virtual desktop manager with support for dragging windows to another desktop and the ability to bind application launches to a specific desktop.
- Use to work with TOML format settings instead of gsettings.
- Adaptation of the panel for use in multi-monitor configurations, the ability to dynamically position the panel when connecting additional monitors.
- Expanding menu options, supporting alternative menu modes such as icon grid and full-screen navigation through existing applications.
- New settings control center.
- Support for work on systems with RISC-V architecture and expansion of support for ARM systems.
Active development of the Budgie 11 branch will begin after the adaptation of the Budgie 10 branch for the needs of distributions is completed. Among the plans for the development of the Budgie 10 branch:
- Preparing for Wayland support;
- Transferring the tracking (indexing) functions of applications to a separate library, which will be used in branches 10 and 11;
- Removal of gnome-bluetooth in favor of a bunch of bluez and upower;
- Deprecation of libgvc (GNOME Volume Control library) in favor of Pipewire and MediaSession API;
- Transferring the launch dialog to a new application indexing backend;
- Involvement in the libnm network settings applet and D-Bus API NetworkManager;
- Reworking the implementation of the menu;
- Power management overhaul;
- Rewriting Rust code for configuration import and export;
- Improved support for FreeDesktop standards;
- Applet handler improvements;
- Adding the ability to work with EFL and Qt themes.
Source: opennet.ru