We thought we just throw some thoughts together as we explore using the programming language Vala for potential future development. Vala is - we understand - a language written initially by GNOME to develop GTK+ applications and interfaces. The Elementary OS developers have embraced this language. Budgie Desktop itself is primarily written in Vala. Why? It is fairly efficient - compiles to small executables and shared object libraries - and hence reduces memory usage. It is fairly memory safe - in that - whilst C can and will enable you to shoot yourself into your proverbial foot/head - at least Vala will hide the major C intracasies leading to more robust code. Well that's the claim anyway. As a team, our profiencies is primarily Python and Go. So exploring Vala is "interesting" - but very slow going since we keep thinking "well we did it this way in python ... so why doesnt Vala work in this way". Why are we looking at Vala? Well, we do want to understand the underlying components of Budgie Desktop - and hopefully fully understand what could & should be backported to 18.04LTS. Longer term - maybe/hopefully helping upstream in its maintainance. So we began by looking for tutorials already written. The valadoc website we have found is the best for beginners. The GTK+ kickstart video is really good - essential viewing. The two longer videos on that site are well worth reviewing and bookmarking. The compile budgie desktop based applets you need to install the package `budgie-core-dev`. Best steer clear from the upstream "budgie-desktop-examples" repo. We couldn't get it to compile - probably because it hasn't been updated to work with budgie-desktop v10.4.x Popovers. Excellent third-parties, Daniel Pinto and Cybre's repositories are excellent reference points.

The Ubuntu Budgie team are pleased to welcome two new team members.

Efkan Isazade

Efkan has joined us in the Project Manager/ Administrator role that was recently advertised. Efkan hails from Azerbaijan and will be ensuring the team meets its goals and schedules for 18.04 LTS and 18.10. Efkan will also be ensuring your donations are continued to be accurately accounted for and managed. A bit about Efkan... "25 years old Master of Business Administration student in Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University with Georgia State University (Atlanta, USA) Joint program. Major in Electronic Governance. Enjoy a challenge and achieving personal goals. Flexible and Result oriented."

Serdar Şen

Serdar hails from Turkey and has joined the team as a developer - primarily applet writing. A bit about Serdar... "Serdar Şen is a freelance software developer, course instructor, graduate student in computer science. Serdar enjoys learning new technologies. He has interests in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He likes to draw and share pictures."

What about me?

Ubuntu Budgie only moves forwards thanks to its fantastic volunteers. So if you are a keen writer, tester (QA), Debian and/or Snap packager, developer (QT/QML/C++ or GTK+ with Vala or C++) please don't hesitate and step forward. Contact me at fossfreedom at ubuntu dot com David (project lead)

With a heavy heart the Ubuntu Budgie team today announce the end-of-support for our 16.04 budgie-remix edition from the beginning of August 2018. We would like to thank the almost quarter of a million downloaders since we first launched budgie-remix back in April 2016 for at least having a look at our fledgling distro. We didnt really expect to support 16.04 for this length of time - we were not an official distro back then but enough people contacted us to convince us to continue rather than the usual 9 months Ubuntu distro support cadence. With a rolling release mechanism for all thing budgie-desktop - the GUI, applets, budgie-welcome, themes etc, the latest 16.04.4 is very much different from the initial 16.04 release.

but I want to continue...

Don't worry! 16.04 Budgie Remix will not self destruct. The underlying pinnings of Ubuntu will keep you updated. Many components share the Ubuntu GNOME support arrangements and will receive updates until May/June 2019. The key linux kernel is updated through Ubuntu itself for 5 years. However our strong recommendation is that you move to 18.04.1 as soon as it is practical for you.

moving forward

18.04.1 will be automatically announced through a prompt for all 16.04 users mid July. Just upgrade when prompted and finally run the "Budgie Complete Installation" menu option to finish. You'll then be on the full 18.04.1 release. Some of the packages that were installed as part of the budgie-remix backports PPA will be uninstalled as part of the upgrade. Use budgie-welcome to reinstall anything that is removed. We also recommend you reset the panel to benefit from the revised Pocillo theme and applets:

nohup budgie-panel --reset --replace &

Please refer to the community wiki for more help: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upgrades Also, Ask Ubuntu has an excellent guide to help you upgrade: http://askubuntu.com/questions/110477/how-do-i-upgrade-to-a-newer-version-of-ubuntu As an alternative you might want to backup your important 16.04 data and do a fresh install - good way for a thorough spring clean!

We have had a successful release of Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS and we now are in full planning mode for 18.10. Similar to the decision made by Ubuntu themselves at 17.10, we have decided to concentrate all our efforts on producing a really good image based on the hardware almost all of you actually use now. Eh - does this impact me? Highly unlikely - from the various reports and statistics we have observed from 16.04 budgie-remix all the way to you enthusiastic 18.04 trail-blazers, almost all of you are now using the 64bit ISO. We have also seen various reports that those that are using the 32bit ISO are again doing so on a 64bit hardware architecture - i.e. you could just use the 64bit ISO but have not chosen to. Ubuntu will still offer 32-bit packages (i386 intel/amd) packages in the various package repositories. … but I need 32bit images We do know that this decision will upset some of you. Rest assured for the entire 18.04 cycle - the next 3 years will continue with updated 32bit ISO’s of Ubuntu Budgie. I’m sure you are already aware software providers and various hardware manufacturers no longer produce 32bit software or are about to drop support for 32bit versions of their software. Chrome, Nvidia, Vivaldi are recent examples. Even the provider of Firefox (mozilla) support 64bit only - its kind of a happy coincidence that 32bit still works and that is thanks to the maintainers working with the opensource community at large. None of the Ubuntu Budgie test team have access to 32bit hardware - so our development is only via Virtualbox. That isnt really satisfactory. I hope you understand the decision. The next three years we will endeavour providing good support moving forward with 18.04 through to 18.10 and beyond.

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 .

Summary As part of our commitment to be transparent with the community, the team is pleased to present a short statement of our financial position covering 2017 to 2018. History

• Budgie Remix had launched in April 2016
• In Nov 2016 Ubuntu Budgie was granted the status as an official community flavour with Ubuntu/Canonical.
• 17.04 was our first release "official" release as a flavour.

Goals As we close off our fiscal year for 2018 (Apr 2017 - Mar 31, 2018), the financial position of the project is very healthy. We have met several goals this year and including our stretch goal:

• LTS Fiscal Goal - ensure that the costs to support a three-year LTS were in place.
• Contribute on behalf of the Ubuntu Budgie community - a financial contribution for 2017 was donated to the Solus community since Solus provides much of the development behind the Budgie Desktop.
• Stretch Goal - ensure we have reserves to meet five years of costs (2018 - 2022).

Operating Costs

• Infrastructure costs relating to the website, test build servers, domain registrations
• Reserves are in place as a contingency to account for unexpected expenses.

Donations Patreon For 2017-2018 we did have a sizable number of Patreon donors - but due to Patreon changing their financial model in Dec 2017 we, unfortunately, lost many donors. Patreon has since rescinded this change, and our previous donors may want to reconsider becoming a Patreon since this gives Ubuntu Budgie a regular income. PayPal We have had many individuals who donate via Paypal, and we thank you all! Sponsorship Digital Ocean We have had a significant vote of confidence by DigitalOcean paying for all of our 2017 hosting and infrastructure fees and have committed to continuing this through to 2018-2019 fiscal year as well. https://www.digitalocean.com Discourse As some of you may know, we recently moved our community over to a discourse forum which was generously provided through sponsorship as well. https://www.discourse.org/ Status.io While this is yet to be implemented on our part, Status.io has provided a sponsorship that will help us keep our community up to date with system interruptions in our infrastructure. https://status.io Partnerships Briefly, we had begun to offer Ubuntu Budgie preinstalled on systems from Nimbusoft. Unfortunately, due to the founder deciding to move in an alternative strategic direction, that association had to end. We do thank Chris Harvey (owner of Nimbusoft) for the very sizeable donation he has given to Ubuntu Budgie. https://nimbusoft.com Future Goals We have set our sights this year to meet two very sizable cost goals; looking to fund equipment with HiDPI capability and with multiple HiDPI monitors. We recognise that more and more of our community use multi monitors and increasingly with HiDPI type resolutions. Unfortunately, we do not have such equipment to provide both development and support activities. Contributions

• This year our community has contributed £2460.
• We have a nominal £953.86 in the bank, with set-aside costs for 2018 to 2022 + reserves.

Our confidence level for our financial viability is as close to 100% as you can get. As a comparison for 2016-2017, our community contributed £248.90 with no set-aside costs and no reserves

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With your help, we look forward to making more donations to developers and organisations who have helped Ubuntu Budgie.

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The Team All Ubuntu Budgie team members including myself are volunteers. At this point we the team do not benefit financially in anyway from your generosity. If we had one or more full-time developers, then the speed of development and improvement would be exponentially higher. For this to become fiscally possible, the project would need to grow to approx 20x the current contribution rate to achieve that. Canonical Support Although we are now an official flavour of the Ubuntu Family, we do not receive any financial help from Canonical. Canonical supports Ubuntu Budgie through their launchpad build systems and ISO distribution costs.

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Thank You All donors are displayed on our website unless you specifically request not to be presented. Donations If you would like to support Ubuntu Budgie , please feel free to donate to the project through either Paypal or Patreon. Thank you to all who have chosen to join our community. David (project lead)