Users can install the desktop environment in various distros

Oct 20, 2016 21:30 GMT  ·  By

After informing us about the release of the Solus 1.2.1 "Shannon" operating system, the Solus Project team proudly announced the availability of the Budgie 10.2.8 desktop environment for various GNU/Linux distributions.

Budgie 10.2.8 comes five weeks after the release of Budgie 10.2.7, and it adds a huge number of improvements that make Budgie a great alternative to existing desktop environments. The biggest new feature of Budgie 10.2.8 appears to be full IBus (Intelligent Input Bus) support, enabling multilingual input.

However, users will also find a new Places indicator applet that they need to add to their Budgie Panel via the Raven notifications and control panel, giving them instant access to their favorite folders, network places, and external drives. Additionally, there are numerous bug fixes around the Icon Tasklist and various other applets.

A "Hibernate" option has been added to the User Indicator applet and the Volume Applet finally received a popover, which appears when clicked, but you can continue changing the volume using the mouse wheel. And it looks like there are many under-the-hood improvements to the Budgie daemon for better OSD placement and iconography support for many applets.

"We have introduced a volume popover for the volume applet. While this may initially appear redundant, it is important to remember that Budgie is interacted in several different ways. While mouse users can scroll on the applet to adjust the volume, this isn’t always easy, nor is it always intuitive or discoverable, when using a touchpad," said the devs.

GTK+ 3.22 support for the theme, Raven and Panel enhancements

Budgie 10.2.8 also ships with a much-improved panel, which now supports re-ordering of pinned apps (finally!), improves support for GTK+ 3.20 or later, and restores the focus to opened windows after closing popovers. Additionally, the Run Dialog now uses the same search algorithm as the Budgie Applications Menu.

Last but not least, the Raven notifications and control panel has been enhanced with support for legacy theme directories, such as ~/.themes, ~/.icons, or ~/.fonts, which users can import from other GNU/Linux distributions into Solus. Also, Raven now makes sure all mouse cursor themes are loaded during launch, and GTK+ 3.22 support was added for the default Budgie theme.

The Budgie 10.2.8 sources are available for download right now from the project's GitHub page, it already landed for all Solus users, and it's coming soon to various supported GNU/Linux distributions, including Arch Linux and Ubuntu Budgie Remix (budgie-remix) 16.10, so make sure that you update as soon as possible to receive all the goodies mentioned above.