After more than a year since the last update, the desktop environment Budgie 10.9.3 has been released. Budgie 10.9.3 consists of separate components including Budgie Desktop, Budgie Desktop View, Budgie Control Center (Fork Gnome Control Center), and Budgie Screensaver (Fork Gnome-screensaver). The project code is distributed under the GPLV2 license. Budgie can be experienced through distributions such as Ubuntu Budgie, Fedora Budgie, Solus, GekkoLinux, and EndeavourOS.
The window manager Budgie Window Manager (BWM), which is an extended modification of the base plugin of Mutter, is used to control Budgie. Budgie is based on a panel design similar to traditional desktop panels. All panel elements are applets, allowing for flexible customization of the composition, placement, and replacement of key panel elements. Available applets include the application menu, task switcher, list of open windows, virtual desktop viewer, power control indicator, volume control indicator, system status, and clock.
Developers are planning a significant release of Budgie 10.10 in the first quarter of 2025. This release is expected to drop support for X11 and only allow operation in Wayland-based environments. However, the Budgie 10.10 branch is not yet ready for release, with one of the main criteria being the achievement of feature parity with the old X11-based environment. After the release of Budgie 10.10, the 10.x series will transition to maintenance mode, with focus shifting to the development of the Budgie 11 branch, which aims to separate desktop functionality from the visualization and output layer.