Budgie Desktop To Be Overhauled / Rebased On QT6
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2026 7:22 pm
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.
This could be a pretty good DE option in the future, along with Cosmic.
From 9to5linux.comNow 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.
This could be a pretty good DE option in the future, along with Cosmic.