Budgie 10.10 finally makes the Wayland jump as development moves to Budgie 11

Budgie may not be one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux but it is an interesting one, and with Budgie 10.10 it finally migrated to Wayland.

In the release announcement developer Joshua Strobl mentioned how "This release series brings to a close just over a decade of Budgie 10 development; we are formally putting Budgie 10 into maintenance mode to focus our efforts on Budgie 11".

Pictured - Budgie 10.10, Credit: Budgie team

Instead of reinventing the wheel and doing their own thing, they're using Wayland-supporting tools from elsewhere as outlined in the post:

• Screenshots: Functionality is powered by grim and slurp for capturing images and selecting screen regions.
• Screen Locking and Idle Management: We have integrated swayidle, gtklock or swaylock, and wlopm. These modern solutions leverage the ext-session-lock protocol, and Budgie Screensaver (our fork of gnome-screensaver) is now considered deprecated. Your screen will automatically dim and lock after inactivity, and manual locking is supported at any time.
• Desktop Backgrounds: Handled by swaybg to ensure wallpapers display correctly under Wayland.
• Application Integration: Uses XDG Desktop Portals xdg-desktop-portal-gtk for most tasks and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr for screenshots and ScreenCasts. This enables applications to request screen sharing in a secure, standardized way.

They're currently recommending using it with a wlroots-based compositor like labwc. They said the move to Wayland "represents a fundamental architectural shift" to a "protocol-first architecture" that "decouples the desktop from a specific window manager (budgie-wm, which in turn relied on our fork of Mutter called Magpie), and makes Budgie truly compositor-agnostic, opening the door for experimentation with alternative compositors beyond our primary recommendations".

On top of the Wayland move the release comes with a lot of improvements to desktop panels, applets and major improvements to Budgie Control Center.

In an additional announcement Strobl noted they're going with Qt6 for Budgie 11 with development already kicked-off. With plans to make Budgie more modular, to allow more personalization and to "pave the way for new form factors, input devices, and workflows". They also plan to improve communication, which has been lacking.