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Budgie is an independent, free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Budgie is developed by the Buddies of Budgie organization, which is composed of a team of contributors from Linux distributions such as Fedora, Solus, Debian, and Arch Linux. Its design emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and elegance.

History

Budgie was created by Ikey Doherty as the default desktop environment for his new Linux distribution, EvolveOS, eventually renamed to Solus. The first version of Budgie was released on . Early versions were slow and prone to crashes, though speed and reliability would improve with successive releases.

On , it was announced that Ikey had ceased communication with the rest of the Solus team for unknown reasons. Joshua Strobl, one of the Solus core team members, would take up the responsibility of continuing Budgie's development after Ikey's departure.

On , Joshua announced that the long-awaited Budgie 11 release would no longer be using GTK due to disagreements with the direction that the toolkit had been taking. It was also announced that the GNOME software suite that had been shipped in the Budgie edition of Solus would be replaced in future versions.

On , Joshua resigned from Solus and established Buddies of Budgie, a new organization for Budgie development, with other active contributors. Under this new organization, Budgie development shifted from being focused on Solus to being focused on improving the experience across all distributions that ship Budgie. The first release under this new organization was v10.6, released on .

Additional components

Budgie Desktop View

Budgie Desktop View is a software component meant to provide desktop icons within Budgie. Budgie Desktop View is implemented in Vala, and uses GTK 3 for widgets. The source code is available under the Apache License 2.0.

Budgie Control Center

Budgie Control Center is a fork of GNOME Control Center with Budgie-specific settings and features, and is the standard settings application for Budgie. Budgie Control Center is implemented in C, and uses GTK 3 and libhandy for widgets. The source code is available under the GNU GPLv2.

Budgie Screensaver

Budgie Screensaver is a fork of GNOME Screensaver with additional fixes and minor updates, and serves to provide an authentication prompt when the system is locked. Budgie Screensaver is implemented in C, and uses GTK 3 for widgets. The source code is available under the GNU GPLv2.

Budgie Backgrounds

Budgie Backgrounds is Budgie's default set of background images for use with Linux distributions that do not provide their own, and is entirely composed of public domain images. The source code and images are available under the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 license.

Releases

Adoption

Reception

Budgie has been generally well received, with reviews noting its appealing visual design and intuitive layout. Bertel King wrote in 2018 that "Budgie feels like someone took the great things about GNOME, took out all the not so great things, set some great default options, and sent that out into the world." However, King also considered this a negative, writing that Budgie "can feel more like a customized version of GNOME than a separate entity." John Perkins described Budgie as "a beautiful desktop that aims to provide sane defaults and a beautiful interface," while lamenting its limited availability on distributions other than Solus.

See also

*GNOME
* LXQt
* MATE (software)
* Cinnamon (desktop environment)
*Solus (operating system)

References

External links

*

Budgie Desktop on OpenSourceFeed Gallery

{{X desktop environments and window managers

Desktop environments based on GTK
Free desktop environments
Software forks
Software that uses Meson
X Window System