Budgie has improved a lot in recent years. Next target, Wayland

just a couple of hours ago wrote an article on WINE in which one of the news was related to Wayland and stated that with each passing day he is gaining more ground. GNOME already uses it by default, and KDE will do so by the end of 2023 on systems that want to go up to Plasma 6. Other desktops they are working on it, and one of those who are going to roll up their sleeves and get serious about it is Budgie.

In January 2022, an initiative began that received the name of Buddies of Budgie, "Budgie's companions" translated into Spanish, and if I have to be honest I have not met him until this week thanks to a tweet from the official Ubuntu Budgie account. In it there is a link that leads to an article in which they explain how things are going with this project with Wayland, more specifically the plans they have to start supporting a protocol that will greatly improve the user experience when it works well in all scenarios.

Budgie has been testing Wayland

Since the time Buddies of Budgie began, the project has been evaluating the Linux ecosystem and desktop space, and has been maturing Wayland protocols and composers and improving support for vendors like NVIDIA. In May 2022 they already anticipated that Budgie 11 would use Wayland as the main option, but they hoped to continue supporting X11. Since then there has been key news related to Wayland.

The first one is that Plasma 6 will use Wayland by default. On the other hand, RHEL has dropped support for X.Org since v9.0, and Mutter has greatly improved its support for the protocol. In GNOME 44, Mutter split his X11 implementation into a different client to facilitate his goal of removing his dependency on GTK3 and to simplify future work on rendering with GTK4. This has caused certain X11 session problems.

So, in summary, they planned to default to Wayland when they released v11 on the desktop, but they say, not me, X11 is slowly being forgotten, and to look to the future they have to seriously consider switching to Wayland. So they will advance their plans and they will use it already in series 10 from the desk.

Much work remains, but...

Yet there is a lot of work left ahead, and this is not something that is done from one day to the next. In fact, and if my memory serves me correctly, KDE started talking about Wayland by default in 2020, and they will end up doing so almost 4 years later, at the end of 2023. Although it is somewhat different in Budgie, since they share components with other desktops such as GNOME and Plasma, so it is assumed that they already have something advanced.

La last version from Budgie was v10.7.2, and it is not ruled out that for v10.8 there will be more news related to Wayland.