I played around with Budgie years ago in the Ubuntu Budgie edition. I thought I'd take a look at how it has progressed since then and see how things progress when they overhaul it and move from GTK to QT6. In CachyOS I removed Cinnamon which I was looking at (yuck) and installed Budgie. It can be configured to look good, but in its current form it has some issues. When using multiple displays, the settings for configuring the displays are surprisingly janky and non-intuitive. Ultimately it works, but I found that after waking the monitors the panels move to the wrong display and the only way to get them back to the correct screen is to restart the session. When using dark mode some applications will still have white title bars - Firefox and Gimp are the ones I've encountered this. I couldn't find a way to fix it, when I did a search on it, one solution was to install Gnome Tweaks (Budgie is currently derived from Gnome which is the source of a lot of its issues). This will probably be resolved when they move away from Gnome in Budgie 11. One anomaly I noticed is the menu icon is Plasma's instead of Budgie's.
budgie10.10.1_screenshot.jpg
Now that Budgie 10.10 is out as the last chapter in the Budgie 10 series, the devs behind this modern Linux desktop environment have kicked off the development of the next major release, Budgie 11.
Budgie developer Joshua Strobl shares with us today some interesting details about Budgie 11, such as the fact that the upcoming desktop environment will be written in the Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks open-source application frameworks, and some steps have already been taken in this direction with the Budgie 10.10 release.
The devs already wrote Budgie Desktop Services, the beating heart of Budgie 11, in Qt 6, and they plan on writing the Budgie Display Configurator in Qt6/Kirigami as well. The end goal here is to make Budgie more modular, allowing users and integrators alike the freedom to fully configure the desktop environment.
“Budgie 11, our goal is not just to port the desktop to a new toolkit. This is our opportunity for a fundamental re-architecture. We are making Budgie more modular, not only to allow for better personalization for distributions and users, but to pave the way for new form factors, input devices, and workflows,” said Joshua Strobl.
That's going to be a major change that's probably going to gut the features. Everyone does that... even when they move to a new version of the SAME toolkit. (I hate it and its why I stick with older versions of things). I remember when KDE 4 came out, everything good about KDE was gone. Then when KDE 6 came out, everything good about KDE 5 was gone. Anything based on QT6 nauseates me, I've been careful not to have it installed on any of my systems. I've dropped (or stick with older versions of) QT programs that won't compile against QT5 anymore.
So that in the screenshot is still the Gnome/GTK+ based Budgie? It actually looks pretty good (I could have mistaken it for KDE with very nice styling). Odd that it has the Plasma start button though (I'd suspect environment pollution between Budgie and KDE... stepping on each other's configuration?). I've seen screenshots of Budgie and it was configured more like XFCE with respect to panels and stuff. (or more like a MacOS panel/dock)
Does CachyOS push that Fish shell on everybody? That'd be the first thing I'd change. Distributors that do things like that piss me off. I like sh (actual Bourne shell in BSD for example), bash, and I can even use a C shell (e.g. tcsh), but to go and change it to some silly thing that's not even POSIX compliant is just clever masturbation. I certainly wouldn't want to waste my time learning what's different about that shell. That's not very "newbie friendly" when bash has been the default shell and sh has been a symlink to it (it behaves compatibly if called that way) since forever, regardless of how friendly they think the shell is, because most of the "here, type this" shell commands that people will find will contain bashisms.
Crux is semi-guilty of that. I remember my first time I used Crux many years ago, I had builds failing for reasons I didn't understand. It was because the scripts were barfing because Crux has the Dash shell for sh (a symlink to dash). They still do it, but not on my system. I removed dash and changed the symlink sh -> bash. Since sh has been a symlink to bash, what happens is bashisms creep into scripts with a #! /bin/sh shebang and as long as sh is bash, people wouldn't notice. If I'm doing anything other than simple commands, I use #! /bin/bash in case I've done anything inappropriate for "sh".
Another thing that could explain the KDE start menu button is CachyOS customization. Icon symlinks or names/properties could point to that icon.
Too bad they are moving to QT6 and soon to fuck it up probably for years, it looks like a nice desktop for people. (I looked at the deps for an Arch build and said nope anyway, though. The simpler my system is, with as few dependencies as possible, the easier things are to understand)
Yeah I assumed it was because of the presence of Plasma, but I didn't notice any other related anomalies.
CachyOS indeed defaulted to the Fish shell, but last summer they made this change for new installations:
In a recent announcement for the upcoming July CachyOS release, the developers announced that the user's shell can be chosen during installation. Before you get too excited, the choices are limited to fish, Zsh, and Bash. During installation, if you don't choose between fish or Zsh, Bash will be chosen for you (even though the default configuration will remain fish).
So they have fish and zsh as choices, and if you don't make a selection you'll get bash? LOL... that's trying to get people to choose one of those two, by not listing bash as a choice with the other two shells. Bash has always been my favourite shell. I always had sh in my shell accounts at ISPs and stuff before I started using Linux. So I was comfortable with bash.
