14 DAY TRIAL // Solus Project leader Ikey Doherty is kicking off the development of the Budgie 11 desktop environment, which will be used by default for the main edition of the Solus operating system.
It's not the first time we talk here about the development of the Budgie 11 desktop, which should have arrived in the last days of 2016. The current Budgie version is based on the GNOME 3.20 Stack, which means that it's using some of its core libraries and apps for providing users with a functional and modern user interface.
Unfortunately, during the migration to the latest GNOME 3.22 Stack, the Budgie developers encountered numerous issues, and as a consequence, they decided it was time to finally drop the use of the GNOME Stack within Budgie, as well as move away from Vala.
"It didn’t start out like this, of course, but as the GNOME platform evolves, so must derived desktops to maintain the integration. As such, our roadmap for Budgie 11 set the priority of undoing this deep coupling to the GNOME stack, and moving away from Vala, to regain control over the experience, feature-set, and stability, of the Budgie Desktop," said Ikey Doherty.
Budgie 11 will still use GNOME apps, but it's adopting Qt
Don't worry, your favorite GNOME apps will still run on top of the Budgie 11 desktop environment, but the team is adopting the Qt platform to continue the development and make Budgie the user interface they've always dreamed of. However, don't confuse the adoption of Qt with the use of the KDE libraries or Plasma desktop components.
The decision was made because GNOME as a platform is evolving in a different direction than Budgie. However, it was too late to rebase Budgie 11 on GNOME 3.22 Stack now when there are only a couple of months until GNOME 3.24 hits the streets, whose apps should be fully supported in the upcoming Budgie 11 desktop environment.
The transition to Qt is effective immediately, so we expect a first development version of Budgie 11 to be ready for public testing in the following weeks. After that, it would appear that the final release of Budgie 11 could arrive sometime this spring, first for users of the Solus operating system.