Budgie 10.9 Desktop Brings Early Wayland Porting Work

With a goal of delivering a Wayland-only Budgie 10 desktop release later in 2024, Budgie 10.9 debuted today with the early-stage porting work to Wayland.

Budgie 10.9 released today with early porting wokr to Wayland, budgie-session is now handling the desktop's session management, and there is a redesigned Bluetooth applet. Budgie's new Bluetooth applet allows for direct connect/disconnect functionality for paired devices, battery life indications, and more.

As for the Wayland porting, Budgie 10.9 features initial ports of various applets and components to using the Wayland-compatible libxfce4windowing library. Budgie intends to use libxfce4windowing for handling some of their Wayland bring-up:

"While libxfce4windowing is under active development and not yet ABI stable, we choose to already adopt it to make the transition from Budgie 10 under X11 to Budgie 10 under Wayland as seamless as possible. libxfce4windowing enables us to port functionality to support Wayland without negatively impacting use under X11, facilitate early "dogfooding" when our porting work is complete, and more effortlessly "flip the switch" to support Wayland and fully drop X11."

For Budgie 10.9, just the "show desktop" applet, Alt+Tab window switcher, and workspace applet have been ported over to libxfce4windowing.

As for the new budgie-session of Budge 10.9, it's a soft fork of GNOME Session 44.

And the official screenshot of the Budgie 10.9 desktop:

More details on the Budgie 10.9 desktop release via BuddiesOfBudgie.org.