14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 launched today as an official flavor of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system as part of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system release.
Until today, Ubuntu Budgie was known and distributed as budgie-remix, so this is its first official release as an Ubuntu flavor endorsed by Canonical. Because of this, the Ubuntu Budgie team had a lot of work on their hands during the past six months to remove everything related to the old budgie-remix name, as well as to make other necessary changes.
"A significant portion of this development cycle has been spent integrating with the Canonical build-system. Key visible integration items were Plymouth customisations, utilizing the Ubiquity installer, reworking packages to remove the 'budgie-remix' identities and replaced with the updated 'Ubuntu Budgie' identity," reads the announcement.
What's new in Ubuntu Budgie 17.04
Shipping with the updated kernel and graphics stacks from Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), which include Linux kernel 4.10, Mesa 17.0.3, and X.Org Server 1.19.3, Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 is using the latest Budgie 10.2.9 desktop environment by default, with the promise that the soon-to-be-released Budgie 10.3 update will land immediately after its launch upstream.
New features in Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 include a Welcome screen that appears at first login, allowing users to do all sorts of things like installing drivers and updates, selecting a default web browser or changing the theme, a new panel applet for changing the volume, application indicator support, OSD (On Screen Display) for volume changes, and a Places applet that helps you navigate the file system.
iBus support is available as well, along with a new applet for changing the keyboard layout. Moreover, the Plank dock has been configured with a specific set of apps, GTK+ theme support for Qt apps is enabled by default, GTK+ 3.22 Arc GTK theme support is present, along with the latest Moka 5.3.5 icon theme and extra theming changes for the new Ubuntu Budgie naming.
A bunch of new applications from the GNOME Stack have been added in this release, including GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer, GNOME Characters, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Documents, GNOME Font Viewer, GNOME Logs, GNOME Maps, GNOME Weather, GNOME Color Manager, as well as GNOME Accessibility. The latest Mutter window manager is integrated as well.
Other noteworthy changes are the replacement of the GNOME Terminal app with Terminix as default terminal emulator, removal of the LibreOffice Base packages from the Live ISO image, Chromium installed as default web browser, GNOME MPV installed as default video player, and libinput used by default for mouse and touchpad support. Download Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 right now from our website.
