18.04 – Beta 2

Beta 2 of Ubuntu Budgie has been released (5th April) – one short month after beta 1! This is the final beta before the actual release on the 26th April.

For beta 2 we have concentrated on bug-fixing and smoothing off those rough edges our user community have reported. As always – if you haven’t told us about an issue … we don’t know about it – and that includes all the vloggers out there!

So in no particular order beta 2 has the following changes over and above beta 1 .

  • Weather Applet: We have managed to get this working again. Yay! Available from Menu – budgie-applets
  • Budgie Calendar Applet: backports a fix from upstream to ensure custom date format are remembered + styling fixes for themes like Pocillo
  • Ant-Theme – latest git version of Ant-Theme is available that includes some nice budgie desktop fixes
  • Pocillo theme:
    • theming of the lock-screen
    • Pocillo now support slick-greeter theming – switched slick-greeter theme to Pocillo-dark, with a more transparent entry field
    • better headerbar styling of the window controls; fixed black separator displays
  • Arc theme has styling fixes for for various issues with budgie desktop, gnome-shell and cinnamon
  • TLP no longer pulls in the Postfix mail-server
  • Showtime Applet now can display 12 and 24hr date format
  • Show the default Ubuntu Budgie icon for budgie-welcome/themes and applets for those users not using Pocillo icon theme – before no icon was shown
  • Showtime Applet now displays correctly on HiDPI screens
  • Hotcorners Applet trigger mechanism takes into account how close the cursor is to a corner – it is less likely now to trigger accidently
  • Window Shuffler is brand-new – GUI and keyboard based grid tiling comes to budgie (see later)
  • Added a fix for the Budgie Desktop system tray to hopefully resolve black-backgrounds and superimposed icons
  • Window Previews now correctly displays when activated via Budgie Settings
  • Budgie Welcome has had a whole series of changes
    • Budgie Welcome now launches on the live ISO session
    • Our discourse support site is now displayed on the home-page. The social media icons have moved to the right of the screen and Gitter has now been removed (since discourse is our new support site)
    • Community page has been revamped
    • Lots of translation updates
    • Recommendations – Flatpack install now works
    • In-line with Ubuntu Policy, third-party repo installs now displays a prompt. Accepting that prompt continues with the installation and adds the third-party repo e.g. Chrome, Vivaldi, Ubuntu Budgie backports PPA
    • Vimix theme is now installable via our backports PPA since the third-party we originally linked to is not actively maintaining its package
    • Skippy-XD has now been removed from the recommendations page – the software is unmaintained for a few years now. It is still installable via command-line through our backports PPA on a “try if it works” basis.
    • Vivaldi is no longer shown on the 32bit ISO – there is no 32bit packages available
    • snap version is displayed on the Welcome About icon
  • Our budgie-plymouth package has now received a fix to stop upgrades crashing when moving from 18.04 –> 20.04 or from 18.04 –> 18.10. We will be backporting this fix for 17.10 and budgie-remix 16.04
  • Minimal install:
    • Budgie Welcome now launches on the minimal installation
    • More packages have been removed to cleanup the minimal installation
    • Minimal install now defaults to Pocillo GTK theme and Pocillo icon theme to ensure commonality with the full install

Introducing Window Shuffler

New for Beta 2 is our keyboard and GUI friendly window-shuffler capability. This short video explains all – enjoy!

Introducing our new support site

Also – we now have introduced our new support site. Thanks to the generosity of discourse.org, our new discourse based website is now up and running.

One to book-mark https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org

More information can be found here .

Discourse