[HN Gopher] Budgie Is Worth a Try
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Budgie Is Worth a Try
Author : thastings
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-02-11 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rentry.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (rentry.co)
| ktm5j wrote:
| Every time I try to open this link (on mobile) after a second it
| redirects me to some sketch porn site..
| LVDOVICVS wrote:
| Same. Firefox on iOS. However, no problem with Edge on iOS.
| Darmody wrote:
| Tried to replicate it on Firefox on Android with no luck. I
| tried with data, wifi, uBlock enabled/disabled, etc.
| wombat-man wrote:
| that's really interesting. I used to have this problem all the
| time but I just realized that I haven't really seen the problem
| on my device in at least a year or so.
| hunterloftis wrote:
| 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.
|
| Ubuntu Budgie + https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto 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).
| kilian wrote:
| 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.
|
| The thing that finally got me was that the workspace switcher
| came with a 300ms timeout before switching workspaces after
| hitting the shortcut.
| JoshStrobl wrote:
| I can't really speak to any sort of timeout, but I have since
| reduced animation timings and tied the "disable animations"
| option into workspace switching as well (so there is zero
| transition in it, should you disable animations).
| thastings wrote:
| I've seen the old Budgie too, it really wasn't good back then.
| Now it's more or less bug-free, alhough, I personally don't use
| multiple workspaces, so can't comment on that.
| hunterloftis wrote:
| This is surprising to hear. I only tried Budgie recently but I
| found it _more_ responsive and reliable than previous window
| managers (xfce, mate). This includes workplace switching which
| I use extensively.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| 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 ;)
| thastings wrote:
| Indeed, wink-wink :D
| clircle wrote:
| I fancy Ubuntu's modified version of Gnome. Budgie looks pretty
| similar to that.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| So I wonder: is Budgie a viable candidate? Screenshots around the
| net look _really_ 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.
|
| 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.
| hunterloftis wrote:
| I just moved my home desktop from Manjaro XFCE -> Ubuntu Budgie
| and it's _significantly_ snappier.
|
| I don't say "faster" because I didn't do any before/after
| quantitative benchmarks, but my experience has been that Budgie
| provides a responsive UI.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thank you! Have you used any 60FPS user interfaces or played
| movies?
| thastings wrote:
| Actually, I'm using Ubuntu Budgie with a 120 Hz 1080p
| monitor, it's very responsive. Very much what you would
| expect these days from any desktop.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Very valuable feedback. Thank you!
| JoshStrobl wrote:
| Long time lurker, had to create an account to post about this
| though. Hey folks!
|
| "Budgie is based on GTK and the GNOME Shell."
|
| 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).
|
| "originally developed for the distro called Solus"
|
| It is still developed _for_ Solus primarily.
|
| "Another nice feature is the extensions that are baked into the
| Budgie Extras app, shipped together with the desktop."
|
| This is part of the Ubuntu Budgie experience, not Budgie itself.
|
| "These extensions are all developed by the maintainers of the
| desktop environment, so breakage is not really expected."
|
| 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.
|
| "One of these extensions is a global menu that works wonderfully,
| and supports all my applications"
|
| This is not one which is developed by us (Solus).
|
| "The print screen keyboard shortcuts known from GNOME don't work
| by default"
|
| Works under Solus.
| ragnese wrote:
| I haven't followed budgie in a couple of years, but the last I
| understood about it, it might not be technically accurate to
| say it's based on GNOME *Shell*, but it's absolutely based on
| GNOME, the desktop stack. Just to clarify your clarification.
| :)
|
| Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on the
| same OS installation- That's how much it shares with GNOME. If
| you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings app,
| it *will* affect your Budgie session.
|
| Maybe you shouldn't say it's "based off of GNOME Shell", but
| it's probably accurate to say that Budgie is an alternative
| Shell for GNOME.
|
| Also, I remember a ton of hype for Budgie 11 from years ago
| already. And that was when Ikey was still smashing out code for
| the project. I even remember Solus devs at the time saying they
| might never actually do version 11 because they had fixed and
| worked around some of the issues that they thought they
| wouldn't be able to in 10.4(?).
|
| So, is Budgie 11 actually going to happen?
| JoshStrobl wrote:
| "but it's absolutely based on GNOME, the desktop stack. Just
| to clarify your clarification. :)"
|
| GNOME Shell is not the same as the rest of the stack.
|
| "Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell on
| the same OS installation"
|
| Yes, it absolutely can. You can use GDM and log in to both.
|
| "If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the Settings
| app, it _will_ affect your Budgie session. "
|
| It entirely depends on what settings you change. For
| displays, that generates the mutter related configurations
| which are used by Budgie because Budgie uses Mutter.
| Networking is related to NetworkManager and not GNOME.
| Notifications is something we intentionally hook into for
| filtering apps in Raven but can trivially be changed, we even
| have our own set of exclusions. Search doesn't apply to
| Budgie, that is specific to GNOME Shell. Applications is
| primarily oriented towards Flatpak. Most of the screen locker
| functionality isn't related because we use slick-
| greeter+lightdm+budgie-screensaver (a fork of gnome-
| screensaver).
|
| Sound can be independently managed, we do that via Raven for
| example (which ties into Gvc). Power settings leverage a mix
| of gnome-related settings and upower. Mouse settings are
| primarily related to libinput. I could go on.
|
| "Maybe you shouldn't say it's "based off of GNOME Shell", but
| it's probably accurate to say that Budgie is an alternative
| Shell for GNOME."
|
| Not really. There are many settings we expose which are not
| related to GNOME or GNOME Shell at all.
|
| "I even remember Solus devs at the time saying they might
| never actually do version 11 because they had fixed and
| worked around some of the issues that they thought they
| wouldn't be able to in 10.4(?)."
|
| Yes and then Ikey, the project founder, let and I took over
| in late Budgie 10.4 and _my_ first release was Budgie 10.5. I
| went back and fixed issues that previously were implied to
| only be fixable in Budgie 11.
|
| "So, is Budgie 11 actually going to happen?"
|
| Yes however it is not a priority over other aspects of Solus
| development.
| ragnese wrote:
| >> Budgie can't even comfortably coexist with GNOME Shell
| on the same OS installation
|
| > Yes, it absolutely can. You can use GDM and log in to
| both.
|
| >> If you change your settings in GNOME Shell with the
| Settings app, it will affect your Budgie session.
|
| > It entirely depends on what settings you change. For
| displays, that generates the mutter related configurations
| which are used by Budgie because Budgie uses Mutter.
| Networking is related to NetworkManager and not GNOME.
| Notifications is something we intentionally hook into for
| filtering apps in Raven but can trivially be changed, we
| even have our own set of exclusions. Search doesn't apply
| to Budgie, that is specific to GNOME Shell. Applications is
| primarily oriented towards Flatpak. Most of the screen
| locker functionality isn't related because we use slick-
| greeter+lightdm+budgie-screensaver (a fork of gnome-
| screensaver).
|
| > Sound can be independently managed, we do that via Raven
| for example (which ties into Gvc). Power settings leverage
| a mix of gnome-related settings and upower. Mouse settings
| are primarily related to libinput. I could go on.
|
| This is exactly my point. Of course you literally _can_
| install Budgie and GNOME Shell next to each other. But the
| very fact that they step on each others ' toes is what I
| meant when I said "comfortably".
|
| The fact that you basically have to guess what settings
| will affect the other DE is my point. It also happens to
| some extent with all DEs- you have to have an intuition for
| what settings are "system" settings and which are "desktop"
| settings. But I remember being frustrated in particular
| that some settings, especially with regard to Mutter,
| affected the other DE. Neither desktop's settings actually
| _refer_ to Mutter explicitly, so how is a user supposed to
| know that changing the window decorations or the double-
| click-titlebar behavior is going to transfer? I also
| vaguely remember some settings being exposed in one DE 's
| settings app, but not the other's, but that setting
| actually having an effect across both (likely Mutter and
| Gnome Tweaks, if I had to guess).
|
| I'm just saying- I recommend not running both Budgie and
| GNOME Shell.
| rkangel wrote:
| Do I understand from a quick Google that you don't support
| Wayland (or at least Solus doesn't)? If you're using mutter you
| should presumably have the core of the capability available I
| believe?
|
| I use Fedora and one of the big reasons is Wayland. I
| understand there are some usecases for which it doesn't work
| well for people and that's exactly why I think it is important
| to use it as much as possible to help get those ironed out. We
| need to move on from X.
| JoshStrobl wrote:
| "Do I understand from a quick Google that you don't support
| Wayland (or at least Solus doesn't)? If you're using mutter
| you should presumably have the core of the capability
| available I believe?"
|
| At this time, we do not support Wayland, that is correct. We
| leverage a fair few X11-specific APIs and include support for
| XEmbed-based system tray icons (you would have to pry system
| tray icons from my cold dead hands :D). Not saying it won't
| ever be supported, but that wouldn't be addressed until we
| move to our own window manager at the very least.
| cycloptic wrote:
| There are numerous serious usability issues with the XEmbed
| tray icons [0], even if you stay on X11 you will eventually
| want to switch over to the StatusNotifier API [1]. This is
| supported by KDE, Ubuntu's Appindicator, and I believe XFCE
| now too. Thanks for your hard work in Budgie BTW.
|
| [0]: https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/system-
| tray-i...
|
| [1]: https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/StatusNoti
| fierIt...
| solarkraft wrote:
| Budgie looks cool, but I've personally stopped dealing with the
| unmaintained legacy complexity stuff of X.
|
| What are Budgie's Wayland plans and how are they
| influencing/influenced by the switch from Mutter? What other
| reasons are there to switch?
| schmorptron wrote:
| Hey, this is great insight! I've been thinking about trying
| solus, and one thing that's great is that it seems to support
| flatpaks well. Do you think that these types of universal
| packages will have a large impact on less well known
| distributions being adopted more in the future as the need to
| have everything users want packaged for it is reduced
| significantly?
| thastings wrote:
| I am sorry about the inaccurate statements made, they have been
| fixed according to your points. Many thanks to the Budgie and
| Solus team for the great desktop experience!
| JoshStrobl wrote:
| Thank you for fixing the items raised, much appreciated!
| Regardless of what operating system you use Budgie under,
| glad you are enjoying the desktop experience :)
| corytheboyd wrote:
| 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)
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It's a shame that such a beautiful operating system is being
| paired with that ugly font.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| 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.
|
| I'm really happy to see Solus continuing development, especially
| after it's original creator left the project.
|
| 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.
|
| Keep up the great work Linux DE developers!
| greyandgreen wrote:
| Agreed. Most DEs are well designed and work well enough. I just
| don't like busy UIs. I am now on Gnome on Pop!_OS because the
| latest Gnome, at least on Pop, seems to stay out of my way. On
| Fedora or other, there are so many errors that constantly
| present themselves. Window Maker is what I used for years until
| I discovered Pop. I may yet install WM on top of Pop.
| ragnese wrote:
| 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).
|
| 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).
|
| 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.
|
| 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!
|
| 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).
|
| So yeah, go give Budgie a try. It probably sucks. But you might
| find that it sucks in ways that are tolerable!
| yboris wrote:
| Sorry if off-topic, but I just heard of a mobile-friendly "iPad
| style OS" called _JingOS_
|
| https://en.jingos.com/
| mythz wrote:
| 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:
|
| - Zorin Lite (Xfce) - https://youtu.be/NrC0zTqkvbU?t=96
|
| - Deepin (QT) - https://youtu.be/WlB_1kQL0nQ
|
| - Garuda (KDE) - https://youtu.be/KK280Y0cNmQ
|
| - Manjaro (Gnome) - https://youtu.be/N1xem3UdgB8
|
| - Pop! OS (Gnome) - https://youtu.be/HAHLx9RekW4
|
| Did checkout Solus/Budgie which looks nice & minimal but wouldn't
| exactly consider it a standout.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| yboris wrote:
| I read an article raving about how beautiful _Deepin_ is -- so
| I 'm eager to eventually give it a try:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/12/10/meet-...
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That is from 2018, and at that time I used deepin daily.
| However, since moving from their compositor to kwin, things
| started going off rails. I was on and off on their github
| pages posting and commenting on issues and what I learned is
| that at that time they had been pushing for solving technical
| debt in their codebase. But the system overall became so
| unstable that I was left with a choice of not updating my
| arch rolling install often or moving to another de.
|
| I chose the latter, moved to KDE and never had any issues
| anymore. No weird hack to make WiFi work, no update breaking
| the compositor making me have to hop between compositors.
|
| I mean, that was 2018, things might have stabilized a little.
| But a year ago a friend of mine, long time fan of deepin
| moved to KDE too because of these same stability issues.
|
| By all means try it out. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
| sirius87 wrote:
| Just in case someone's looking for that macOS look and feel
| with the stability of the Linux Mint Cinnamon [1] desktop
| environment, here's how - https://youtu.be/DMs7DX3Um9E
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/oFx_aMbN_NY?t=19
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| veddox wrote:
| I haven't tried Budgie yet. I really like Elementary - a lovely
| design consistently implemented. Unfortunately (like you said
| for Budgie), I found it buggy enough that I eventually went
| back to standard Ubuntu. Might give it another try in a few
| years.
| thastings wrote:
| Case in point. Pop really is the pinnacle of GNOME Ubuntu
| derivatives IMO, I've run it for years. And if it wasn't for
| the 18.04 base of Elementary, Budgie would've slipped under my
| radar completely.
| greyandgreen wrote:
| Agreed. Pop is the distro to beat for daily use for me at
| least. I've been using Linux as a daily driver since 1998 and
| until Pop, the only thing I felt comfortable with was Window
| Maker.
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