loading . . . The Budgie desktop developers _announced_ today the release and general availability of the Budgie 10.10 desktop environment, which is the last update in the Budgie 10 series and the first to go **Wayland-only**.
Work on Budgie 10.10 kicked off more than a year ago, and many of Budgie’s components have already been ported to Wayland during this time. As a result, Budgie 10.10 is here as the first release of this modern desktop environment to mark the official migration from X11 to Wayland.
Budgie 10.10 uses a wide range of Wayland protocols, including ext-workspace-v1, wlr-foreign-toplevel-management-unstable-v1, wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1, wlr-output-management-unstable-v1, and xdg-output-unstable-v1 to power the Wayland-only Budgie session.
While the devs are working on their own Wayland compositor, they recommend using a wlroots-based compositor, such as **Labwc**. They even implemented a “labwc bridge” that runs automatically at login to copy over Budgie’s own labwc configuration into `~/.config/budgie-desktop/labwc` and avoid conflicts with existing configurations.
This bridge enables various functionality under Wayland, including default keyboard shortcuts for essential actions, input acceleration for mice and touchpads, consistent theming for fonts, drop shadows, and title bar layouts, specific window rules for the desktop, and various window management features. Bottom line, everything works exactly like it worked in the X11 session.
“Fundamentally, the experience of using Budgie Desktop under Wayland remains the same as it was under X11,” said Joshua Strobl. “You still have your applets, panels, and Raven, along with desktop icons provided by Budgie Desktop View. Your keyboard shortcuts remain familiar. The team has put extensive effort into ensuring that the transition to Wayland is as seamless as possible for end users.”
Budgie 10.10 comes with a bunch of popular Wayland tools too, including grim and slurp for capturing images, swayidle, gtklock or swaylock, and wlopm for screen locking and idle management, swaybg for handling desktop backgrounds, and wdisplays for managing display configuration.
Apart from all the Wayland changes, the Budgie 10.10 release also brings updates to several applets, including IconTasklist, Night Light, Tasklist, Workspaces, and Notifications, panel updates, as well as improvements to in-house tools like Budgie Control Center, Budgie Desktop View, and Budgie Session.
Most notably, the Night Light applet now integrates with Gammastep to control the color temperature of your display, the Notifications applet now lets you easily toggle the Do Not Disturb mode with a middle click, while the Tasklist applet saw a more modern implementation to scale better with many apps.
Additionally, both Budgie Panel and Budgie Desktop View will now leverage `layer-shell`, the former for anchoring itself to screen edges and the latter to ensure it remains positioned behind windows, Raven, and the panel.
Lastly, Budgie Control Center received visibility checks to various panels, Wayland support for the Multitasking panel, keyfiles to customize what BCC shows for window managers, a standalone panel for the Night Light feature, and support for various accessibility options, including a magnifier.
Budgie 10.10 will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as openSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch Linux, and it will also be included in the upcoming Fedora Linux 44 and Ubuntu Budgie 26.04 LTS releases, due out around April 2026.
Next stop, **Budgie 11**.
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