Long time lurker, had to create an account to post about this though. Hey folks!<p>"Budgie is based on GTK and the GNOME Shell."<p>To clarify, Budgie is NOT based on GNOME Shell. Budgie uses gnome-settings-daemon, GTK, and Mutter. It's written with GTK, C, and Vala, whereas GNOME Shell is written in C, St, and JavaScript. Budgie 11 isn't going to use any GNOME applications, its settings daemon, or Mutter. May not even use GTK (but rather EFL).<p>"originally developed for the distro called Solus"<p>It is still developed <i>for</i> Solus primarily.<p>"Another nice feature is the extensions that are baked into the Budgie Extras app, shipped together with the desktop."<p>This is part of the Ubuntu Budgie experience, not Budgie itself.<p>"These extensions are all developed by the maintainers of the desktop environment, so breakage is not really expected."<p>As the developer of Budgie, no these are not all developed by the maintainers. Many of them are developed by Ubuntu Budgie, whereas I use and develop on Solus. Breakage is to be expected and has occurred in the past, leading me to have to triage these issues filed against proper upstream rather than Ubuntu Budgie's extras repo.<p>"One of these extensions is a global menu that works wonderfully, and supports all my applications"<p>This is not one which is developed by us (Solus).<p>"The print screen keyboard shortcuts known from GNOME don't work by default"<p>Works under Solus.
Just happened to be checking out Linux Distro's when this came up, here's are some videos of (IMO) the best looking modern ones I've found:<p>- Zorin Lite (Xfce) - <a href="https://youtu.be/NrC0zTqkvbU?t=96" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/NrC0zTqkvbU?t=96</a><p>- Deepin (QT) - <a href="https://youtu.be/WlB_1kQL0nQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/WlB_1kQL0nQ</a><p>- Garuda (KDE) - <a href="https://youtu.be/KK280Y0cNmQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KK280Y0cNmQ</a><p>- Manjaro (Gnome) - <a href="https://youtu.be/N1xem3UdgB8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/N1xem3UdgB8</a><p>- Pop! OS (Gnome) - <a href="https://youtu.be/HAHLx9RekW4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/HAHLx9RekW4</a><p>Did checkout Solus/Budgie which looks nice & minimal but wouldn't exactly consider it a standout.<p>Haven't used a Linux Desktop as a daily driver for over a decade so haven't been keeping up to date with the state of the Linux Desktop and was surprised to find these fringe distros looking nicer than some of the larger more mainstream ones I used to run.
Like many I needed to replace a very old MBP recently, and wasn't enthusiastic about paying top dollar for developer nag screens and recompiling stuff for a custom processor. I decided to once again try laptop Ubuntu, with an Asus Zephyrus. It's actually working great. Even battery life is good and I have a cuda capable graphics card. I think it's finally the year of desktop Linux ;)
I really like Solus and Budgie, but last time I tried it enough things were broken (ex: switching workspaces via keyboard shortcuts) that I moved on. I currently dual boot Pop and Elementary. I particularly like Elementary’s terminal and their picture in picture feature. But elementary is getting long in the tooth.
I dont like Gnome's defaults. I have the standard GNOME 2 was better mindset. Honestly its the giant app switcher thingy that comes up when you press Super. I just cant stand that. But I wanted the "it just works" aspect of Ubuntu, so I looked around and went with Ubuntu Budgie. I would have gone full solus, but I needed to run Unity3D so I stuck with Ubuntu. I think Budgie is the best looking DE for my tastes. Most things worked great, but I did have a few random problems. I had a bug in Plank where new apps wouldnt show up on it. I gave up on fixing it and switched to Linux Mint. Mint's Cinnamon and Budgie are pretty similar, and Mint just had a few more years of maturity under its belt.<p>I'm really happy to see Solus continuing development, especially after it's original creator left the project.<p>I'm very happy with the state of Linux DE's these days. The haters are always gonna hate but Budgie, Pantheon, Cinnamon and MATE are all light years ahead of where we were not long ago. And like other posters have mentioned, we are also witnessing a decay in the quality of MacOS.<p>Keep up the great work Linux DE developers!
I'm pondering installing a graphic interface on my home NAS-like Manjaro server so I can just watch my movies and shows directly through it.<p>Last time I tried this, XFCE was quite adequate. Not much customisation or anything fancy but I don't need it for a KODI-like machine anyway.<p>So I wonder: is Budgie a viable candidate? Screenshots around the net look <i>really</i> nice but I'm skeptical how lightweight is it. For example, can I play 60FPS movies? RAM usage isn't a concern; the server has 32GB of it.<p>Apologies if all this comes off as a bit naive; I deliberately have mostly avoided Linux desktop so far and I'm now finding myself in a position when I don't know much about it.
I really wanted to like Budgie but it has so many nits/broken things when I tried it two years ago that I moved away.<p>The thing that finally got me was that the workspace switcher came with a 300ms timeout before switching workspaces after hitting the shortcut.
My setup is a USB-C hub + switch that toggles my monitor/keyboard/mouse/headphones/webcam between my work (MBP) and personal (homemade frankenstein) machines.<p>Ubuntu Budgie + <a href="https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto</a> makes this a great experience by letting me re-use muscle memory (the key left of space + space => global menu; the furthest-left key + arrows => workspace switching).
A couple of people are here mentioning bugs they've encountered, etc. So I'm responding with them in mind (not necessarily arguing with or against them).<p>I had grown increasingly pessimistic with my personal computing choices. I'm into the philosophy of truly owning and controlling my stuff, so I run free operating systems exclusively on my personal machines, including my phone (to the extent that it's possible with the firmware blobs, etc).<p>But all Linux desktops are pretty rough around the edges. It really disappointed me that I've never had a Linux machine that just worked perfectly. It was always something- xmodmap would just stop working in Plasma, settings wouldn't stick in Xfce, GNOME's sloppy focus doesn't work consistently, etc.<p>I started to get bummed out until I've been working on this Macbook Pro for work. The stupid thing can't even keep the background images correct. First of all, you can't just say "Please use this same image/color for all desktop background on all screens." So you set every background to the same thing manually, like some kind of animal. Then you plug your laptop into your two monitors at home and one of them has the default wallpaper! Okay, so you set that one to the image you want. Great. Then you go back to the office and plug into those monitors again and one of THOSE is somehow back to the default wallpaper! It happens every time I plug back into a different set of monitors!<p>Now I'm not pessimistic anymore! Nothing works. It's great. We're all equal. A trillion dollar company can't even make an OS that sets the wallpaper correctly (or prevent bugs where anyone can login as root, or write a calculator app that works correctly).<p>So yeah, go give Budgie a try. It probably sucks. But you might find that it sucks in ways that are tolerable!
I’ve been using the Ubuntu Budgie for a few months now to replace an ancient MBP and it’s been great. Some minor bugs, but nothing like what others are mentioning (switching between workspace works fine, and is fast)
Sorry if off-topic, but I just heard of a mobile-friendly "iPad style OS" called <i>JingOS</i><p><a href="https://en.jingos.com/" rel="nofollow">https://en.jingos.com/</a>