Hey everyone, it has been a little while since our last post so here are some latest news on what’s happening
Official Status
As you already know, we’ve acquired official status, marking another milestone in our distro development. Starting from 17.04 we will be using Ubuntu Budgie name, while older releases will keep the budgie-remix name in accordance with Ubuntu rules. At the moment, we’re currently updating a lot of stuff to prepare for first official release.
17.04 is turning out to be an exiting release – upstream kernel brings much needed AMD graphics changes, GCC 7 compiler changes = speed increases … all in all an exciting snappier release.
Team News
Udara has taken a break to deal with urgent issues. We thank him very much for all of his hard work! Thus we definitely need to fill his considerable ‘shoes’.we need a graphics designer/artist The Ubuntu Budgie team are on the look out for a new member of the team as a graphics designer/artist. The person needs to be be enthusiastic who loves to integrate and create innovative artwork at fairly short notice to fit and target single or multiple platforms – websites/newsletters/application artwork etc. Interested? Go-on – its a great open-source opportunity! Contact us through our websites https://ubuntubudgie.org/contact and https://budgie-remix.org/support-us/ or come and have a chat in our community chat room – https://gitter.im/ubuntubudgie/community
New Website – ubuntubudgie.org
As you already noticed, we’ve updated our new ubuntubudgie.org website, making it faster and easier to use on variety of devices. Want to download Ubuntu Budgie from phone? You can! No more fighting with website when visiting various pages or posts. The website is fully responsive which results in better expereince for every user. If you encounter any bugs, or something weird, slow loading etc. please feel free to report it to us, so that we can fix it and provide awesome browsing experience for our users.
Once finished we’ll be repointing budgie-remix.org to our new website URL.
Budgie-Desktop v10.2.9
You should have all received upstream’s very latest maintenance release of budgie-desktop. According to the release notes , all efforts will now be expended on the v11 release. We don’t know the date but expect exciting news earlier rather than later next year!
10.2.9 has been sent to Debian for their consideration – once the review cycle has completed it will automatically appear in Ubuntu 17.04
Development
Application indicator has been improved most of the issues that were posted on the GitHub have been fixed. It looks and works better in both 16.04 and 16.10. Applet color settings are now respected, whether you choose inbuilt theme with and without styling region, or if you are using another theme. AppIndicator Applet is now available in Debian and Zesty as well.
Currently, we’re working hard on next release, which will have a lot of different updates and fixes. We have successfully updated package names in Zesty from budgie-remix to Ubuntu Budgie. We’ve also been sponsored to upload our ubuntu-budgie-meta package which will allow us to produce ISO’s. Also, we’ve added some changes to Ubiquity slideshow and how it functions overall. A Pull request has been done for Canonical ISO builder – this has been accepted; this is the very last step – once Canonical devs push the “button” we will see automatically generate daily Ubuntu Budgie ISO’s for 17.04.
We’ve backported a patch from xenial to yakkety users which should result in budgie-desktop stability and far fewer crashes when installing or updating. The good news is that upstream are working hard with budgie v11 and a brand new menu system which will finally fix all the not-so-nice menu crash issues budgie-desktop currently has when running in Ubuntu.
Have a look at budgie-welcome – new is the beginnings of our browser ballot screen – you choose at the push of a button what browser you want. Eventually we will include out-of-tree browsers like Chrome and Vivaldi.
Finally – in preview testing – is a remix of our remix! We will call this “budgie-remix fresh” and it is our ultimate hacker’s distro. A totally minimal package free install allowing you to customise everything about your installation. Out of the box 64bit weighs in at less than 220MB RAM usage. 32bit is less than 190MB! You are in control … we are certainly very interested in your creations – so let us know what you have created based on the fabulous budgie-desktop. We intend to finalise this during the 17.04 cycle so we’ll have two ISO’s – a minimal fresh edition and the exciting new official release.