Budgie Desktop is a free, open-source Linux desktop environment known for its Raven sidebar and traditional layout. See its history, features, and where to…
Budgie began life as a component of a single Linux distribution rather than a standalone project. Developer Ikey Doherty announced it in December 2013 as the intended default desktop for EvolveOS, a distribution he was building that would later be renamed Solus. The first public release arrived in February 2014, and Budgie quickly became closely identified with Solus's identity and design philosophy over the following years, with rapid early iteration including the November 2014 Budgie 8 release, which added a redesigned application menu with usage-based sorting, panel auto-hide, and application pinning, and culminating in the December 2015 release of Budgie 10, a full codebase rewrite in the Vala programming language that became the architectural foundation for years of subsequent development.
For a long stretch, Budgie's fortunes were tied tightly to Solus specifically, but that began to change as other distributions recognized its appeal. SparkyLinux and Manjaro packaged Budgie in 2015, and Arch Linux, Ubuntu, and Void Linux followed in 2016. The Ubuntu-based Budgie remix eventually grew into Ubuntu Budgie, an officially recognized Ubuntu flavor maintained under Canonical's flavor program, which significantly widened Budgie's reach to users who had never used Solus at all.
A pivotal moment in Budgie's history came on January 1, 2022, when Joshua Strobl, who had taken over as Budgie's lead developer, resigned from the Solus project entirely and founded a new, independent organization, Buddies of Budgie, dedicated specifically to Budgie's continued development outside of any one distribution's control. This decoupled Budgie's roadmap from Solus's specific priorities and positioned it as a genuinely distribution-agnostic desktop environment, available and actively maintained across Solus, Ubuntu Budgie, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Deepin, and other distributions.
Under Buddies of Budgie's stewardship, the project has committed to its most significant technical shift since the 2015 Vala rewrite: Budgie 11, a from-the-ground-up re-architecture that moves the codebase to Qt6 and C++, structured around a modular core with a pluggable shell design. This is a deliberate long-term investment intended to give Budgie a more maintainable and extensible foundation for continued development over the next decade, rather than continuing to build incrementally on the aging Vala and GTK-era architecture that has powered it since 2015.
Budgie refers to Budgie Desktop, a free and open-source Linux desktop environment. It is not a personal finance or budgeting application; that is a different, unrelated product category.
Yes. Budgie is free and open-source software with no purchase price, license fee, or subscription plan of any kind.
Budgie was created by developer Ikey Doherty, first announced in December 2013 and released in February 2014 as the default desktop for his EvolveOS distribution, which was later renamed Solus.
Budgie is the default desktop on Solus and is available as the official Ubuntu Budgie flavor of Ubuntu. It is also packaged for Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, and several other distributions.
Yes. Since January 2022, Budgie has been developed independently of Solus by the Buddies of Budgie organization, which is currently working on a major re-architecture called Budgie 11, rewriting the desktop in Qt6 and C++.
Raven is Budgie's signature all-in-one sidebar that combines notifications, a calendar, media playback controls, volume adjustment, and system resource monitoring in a single accessible panel.
Budgie is generally considered lighter on system resources than heavier desktop environments like KDE Plasma, while still offering a fully featured, modern desktop experience, though it is not as minimal as very lightweight environments like Xfce or LXQt.
Budgie 11 is a from-the-ground-up re-architecture of Budgie Desktop currently in development, moving the codebase to Qt6 and C++ with a modular core and pluggable shell design intended to modernize the desktop for long-term maintainability.