r/BudgieDesktop

I'm in love with Budgie ever since I found it. Used in Fedora, in Ubuntu, then manually installed it in Debian and now I'm using it in Fedora 44.

I do really enjoy the looks and I'd rather use the KDE apps and have them working well.

But the thing is: there are some glitches that shouldn't be on a final stable release. And some things just aren't well implemented and have broken the way that I used it.

My impressions on the first 72h trying to set it up:

a) The Display settings are weird as hell. In 10.9 there were no way to actually do panels on the second monitor, and it constantly would lose the settings for the dual monitor setup and only turn one of them on. Now, not only am I losing the settings everytime I wake my laptop up, but I don't even have enough settings to work with. The first one: I cannot set the main display. Which means, for usage as a laptop with a second bigger monitor, that many functions will remain locked on the smaller laptop screen. Not a huge deal for me, since I bought my second monitor mirroring the ppi and brightness of the laptop screen, but it will be heavily bad for someone who uses a second higher DPI monitor and barely wants to look at the main monitor. Or someone with a desktop multi-monitor setup that has the system always detecting the wrong one as the "main" monitor. It works also poorly enough that the notifications don't appear properly, since somehow they end up at a lower corner with half of their height out of bounds.

b) Setting panels work too bad now. There could be a bright side: now when I move the Budgie settings window to another screen, it allows me to create panels for that screen, which I couldn't do in 10.9. The issue, though? Not a single created panel actually goes where it should, they don't fill the whole length or height, even though they don't allow the apps to occuppy it, which means that it understands how tall or wide the screen is, it just doesn't work well filling it. Even Raven opens wrongly: if you put a side panel and it leaves 40 or 50px unoccupied, when you open Raven it also doesn't fill those pixels. Mind you that toggling dock mode doesn't solve it. Also, any panel other than the default one is created with the wrong positioning: there's always 4 or 5px that get "eaten" out of borders. And, to top all of that, there are several bugs in settings, like if you move the panel or change any setting, most of the times you have to close the settings entirely before being able to add something to that panel. You might click to add, and choose what you want, but nothing happens. Also, and it's very important: since I lose the settings all the time, if I create a panel on the second screen, every time it resets the dual monitor settings the panel on that screen goes to the main screen and everything ends up screwed again.

c) Many addons are gone, and some apps that were brought in don't work well. System monitor sometimes isn't working properly. Discover has some glitches. But also some changes to panel elements that were made basically killed one of the main things I loved on Budgie: the Workspace Switcher. On 10.9, it used to show the windows opened in each desktop, which meant that people who use it could do away with other things like Task Icons. Now, it's basically blank and useless, instead of the powerhouse it used to be: all icons of all workspaces available, basically multiplying the control and the overview I had when working with three or four workspaces filled with things open in them. I could see the icons, click on them, drag apps to other workspaces whenever I wanted, and always see what was where.

d) And to add to that, the changes on keyboard shortcuts: the shortcuts to move windows to another screen aren't working. Which means having to use the mouse more. Which sucks if I have to have a Icon Task List + a workspace switcher at the same time eating away at my panel space. Specially since now I'm stuck with having a panel on the smaller laptop screen instead of having it at my main 1080p one.

Other than that, I did find the update makes it perform even better and everything is very stable. Also, things look very good.

But I feel that if those things don't get patched up (or if I don't find workarounds), perhaps I'm bound to return to 10.9 to have the workflow I used to have before.

I'm not sure those changes are meant to be, or are entirely on Budgie, or if they are bugs on the Fedora implementation. I'm using Fedora 44 on a Dell Inspiron 15 3476.

TLDR: The Workspace Switcher change broke my entire workflow around Budgie. Panels don't position properly and the Display Settings is very bad and doesn't hold the settings. Might have to go back to 10.9.