The Budgie desktop team announced today the release and general availability of Budgie 10.9 as the latest version of this modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
The biggest change in Budgie 10.9 is initial Wayland support by porting several components and applets to the libxfce4windowing library, an abstraction library created by the development team behind the Xfce desktop environment to support various Wayland protocols.
The Budgie team has been working on enabling Wayland support for quite a while now, aiming full Wayland support for the upcoming Budgie 11 series. During the development of Budgie 10.8, they announced that they’re working on an in-house Wayland compositor created on top of wlroots called Magpie 1.0.
“While libxfce4windowing is under active development and not yet ABI stable, we choose to already adopt it to make the transition from Budgie 10 under X11 to Budgie 10 under Wayland as seamless as possible,” said Joshua Strobl. “libxfce4windowing enables us to port functionality to support Wayland without negatively impacting use under X11.”
This release also introduces a redesigned Bluetooth applet that now provides direct connect and disconnect functionality for paired Bluetooth devices, battery life indicators, and a new functionality that lets you send files to your Bluetooth devices. The new Bluetooth applet no longer depends on gnome-bluetooth.
Another interesting change in Budgie 10.9 is the adoption of budgie-session for session management, a “softish fork of gnome-session, designed to provide a stable session manager for Budgie 10.x”. This ensures that Budgie retains the X11-related session code until the desktop is fully ported to Wayland.
Check out the blog announcement for details about the bug fixes and minor refinements that landed in Budgie 10.9 and keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the new Budgie Desktop version and update your installations as soon as possible.
Last updated 7 hours ago