Joshua Strobl of the Budgie Desktop Development Team has announced the general availability of version 10.6 of the Linux-based desktop environment.
This release is the first release that represents the new direction of the Budgie Desktop developers, which is to turn the desktop interface into a platform rather than just a product, that's why a bunch of changes have been made to the Budgie components and many parts of the interface have been written in this release.
In Budgie Desktop 10.6, the development team has addressed the issue of inconsistency between the various components of the Budgie desktop by adding border-radius in most dialogs, Raven Widgets, and Panel Popover content, as well as creating a unified color scheme for widgets on the panel, reduce the semi-transparency to improve readability, reduce the use of borders and shadows, and making some general improvements to support for GTK themes, such as with the Budgie menu.
Furthermore, the developers have made improvements to the interface panel and its UI elements, such as adjusting the raven size to fix panel size changes, preventing a crash when the same applet is deleted in some way twice, and the use of Precise battery levels icons when they are supported by the icon theme.
The Clock Applet text is now wrapped on vertical panels, the default panel size has been increased to 36 pixels and its default configuration has been updated to reflect the configuration used in Solus OS via its Budgie Desktop Branding package.
The notification server saw a rewrite and move out from Raven, which opens up the possibility for it to be used in other Budgie components, as the ability to support notification badges in the Icon Task list in the future.
Budgie desktop now uses GTK.Stack for notification popups, providing a better way to reflect the notification body content, clicking on notification popup now triggers the default action instead of adding a button for the default action, and an issue where the notification mute button sometimes started without an image has been fixed as well.
Lastly, Budgie Desktop 10.6 comes with a new settings app named Budgie Control Center, as a part of its plans to not rely on the GNOME desktop. It's a fork of Gnome control center with various value-add such as Raven keybinding support, improved fractional scaling support when supported by the operating system, and re-organization of functionality.
Budgie desktop version 10.6 should arrive in the rolling Linux distros repositories in the coming days, while users of other Linux distributions will have to wait longer to get it. If you are in a hurry and know what to do, you can also build it from the source, but know that this is only for advanced users, as you may break your operating system when trying to build it from the source.
