Budgie 10.7 arrives with redesign improvements and more

The organization Buddies Of Budgie, who has overseen the development of the project since its separation from the Solus distribution, has released the new version of the Budgie desktop environment 10.7.0.

The Budgie 10.x branch continues development of the classic codebase based on GNOME technologies and its own implementation of GNOME Shell. In the future, it is expected that the development of the Budgie 11 branch will begin, in which they plan to separate the functionality of the desktop from the layer that provides display and output of information, which will allow abstracting from toolkits and specific graphic libraries and implementing full support for the wayland protocol.

Main new features of Budgie 10.7

In this new version coming from Budgie 10.7, the new application indexer is highlighted, which provides accounting for installed graphical programs by tracking the appearance of desktop files in typical system and user directories.

The new indexer replaced the libgnome-menus package and unified the logic to display applications when browsing the main menu (Budgie Menu) and the program launch dialog (Budgie Run).

Another of the changes that stands out is the improved application categorization and provides grouping of categories more relevant according to the purpose (for example, the categories "Administration", "Settings" and "System" are added to the "System" section).

In addition to this, we can also find a significantly improved interface to show notifications, as well as that a visual effect has been implemented for the smooth appearance and disappearance of notifications.

The desktop customizer has a new interface widget selector that applies to both regular panel widgets and the new Raven sidebar widgets. The interface for widgets now shows information about the author, the task, the site and the license.

The main menu has been significantly improved, In addition, support was added for the user's personal menu, which allows organizing the launch of the file manager in typical directories, such as Start, Documents, Music and Video.

Of the other changes that stand out:

• After exiting full screen mode, a summary of missed notifications is provided.
• Normalized text output to two lines without resizing the window.
• Fixed issues with flickering, button size, and focus switching
• . Improved compatibility with the FreeDesktop Notifications specification.
• Added support for notification sound cue and linking individual sounds to notifications from different apps.
• The architecture of the Raven applet responsible for displaying the sidebar has been redesigned.
• A new API is proposed for the creation of widgets embedded in the panel, in which, by analogy with the widgets for Budgie Panel, the libpeas library is used, which allows creating plugins in C, Python and Vala.
• Added support for free positioning and removal of widgets (previously added widgets can be hidden, but not removed).
• Implemented a new widget for the Raven Dashboard to track CPU load and memory consumption. Widget redesigned and made more compact with media player.
• Provided the ability to quickly mute the sound by clicking on the volume control widget title.
• Added the ability to disable the display of day names in the calendar widget. A reverse sorting of notifications is provided (old notifications are on top).

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link

How to install Budgie on Linux?

For those who are interested in being able to install this desktop environment on their system, they can do so by following the instructions that we share below.

Who are they for Ubuntu, Debian or any derivative users of these, they can install directly from their repositories. To do this they must open a terminal and in it they will type the following:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install ubuntu-budgie-desktop

Now for who are they users of Arch Linux or any derivative of this, the installation will be done from the AUR repositories, so they must have the repository enabled in their pacman.conf file and have an AUR wizard. For the case of this article we will use YAY.

In a terminal we are going to type the following command:

yay -S budgie-desktop-git

While for those who are openSUSE users The installation can be done by typing the following command in a terminal:

sudo zypper in budgie-desktop

Finally and how is it in general, for those who are interested in being able to compile of the environment from its source code on their own, they can obtain the source code of the latest released version from the following link.