The Budgie desktop development team has released a Developer Preview of Budgie 10.10, a significant update to the popular desktop environment that exclusively supports Wayland systems. This marks a pivotal step as Budgie transitions away from X11 sessions.
Initiated over a year ago, the development of Budgie 10.10 aims to leverage various Wayland protocols, including ext-workspace-v1, wlr-foreign-toplevel-management-unstable-v1, and wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1. As the final iteration in the Budgie 10 series, the focus will subsequently shift to Budgie 11, anticipated to be released next year.
Budgie 10.10 will utilize Labwc as its default Wayland compositor, and it encourages users to opt for a wlroots-based compositor. Features under Wayland support include default keyboard shortcuts, input acceleration, and improved theming setups, alongside window rules and snapping functionalities.
This release also promises enhancements to existing applets like Night Light, Keyboard Layout, and Workspaces, while integrating the new Display Configuration Batch system for managing display settings more efficiently.
For those eager to test this new environment, the Developer Preview is now available in the development repositories of various Linux distributions, including Fedora Rawhide and Ubuntu PPA, primarily aiming at developers and packagers involved in Linux distribution.