 Hey there and welcome to the Fedora podcast. This is episode number 29 Fedora spins buggy edition My name is Eric the IT guy Hendricks, and I am so excited because I just saw the rough draft for the new video bumpers That we'll be using on the podcast. I heard some samples of some audio that we're going to be using So I'm really excited here in the next episode or two We should have like a more dramatic introduction to to the episode instead of just tada here. We are But that being said it wouldn't be the Fedora podcast without someone to talk to and For this episode I could think of no one better than our own Joshua to join me on the Fedora podcast to talk about budgie Welcome to the Fedora podcast Joshua. Yeah, thanks for having me on Thank you for volunteering and if I if I remember correctly, it's it's pretty early in your time zone It's it's only midnight. It's it's not a problem energy drinks, you know, whatever Well, it's it's four o'clock here. So, you know, they always say it's five o'clock somewhere and and apparently that's the East Coast right now All right, so why don't why don't we kick this off? Why don't you introduce yourself and And the usual questions we ask is who are you? What do you do for a living if you if you care to share? What do you do for Fedora and then because we're all about the people here? What do you do for fun? Yeah, so my name is Joshua Strobel I am the founder of the open-source organization called buddies of budgie Which develops the budgie desktop environment and I also lead the Fedora budgie SIG Which is the special interest group that's responsible for the packaging of budgie desktop and creating fancy things that would be talking about in the show so In terms of what I do for a living. I am a full stack developer And it's 2023. So I think most people know what that means. It's react. It's no JS. It's a little bit of go-lang But I do have some experience in consultancy with go-lang and cloud orchestration with Kubernetes and and server admin e-bits with ansible and puppet and Fedora, of course and so on so That's sort of my background of what I do for a living and then in terms of what I do for Fedora It is as one would expect related to budgie So I package budgie because it's needed for a budgie spin I do a budgie spin because I wanted to make sure that people had a sane in quotes out of the box budgie experience On top of Fedora without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. And then of course, I've since created Fedora onyx Which will maybe talk about So yeah, that's primarily what I do in terms of the Fedora land I would like to get involved in core OS Should time permit because that's a really interesting project. I run it on my home server It's awesome. And you know, I'm really bullish about immutable operating system. So Yeah, but when I'm not thinking about budgie desktop when I'm not thinking about Fedora stuff Both of those being rare things I like to play video games or learn how to make games as well So in like Godot and Blender and all that but I've been on a real binge lately with like some roguelikes some ERPGs like halls of torment and 20 minutes till dawn and I play like elder scrolls online a couple statues back there of Other schools. I didn't see those. We would have talked to that about that in the pre show Yeah, yeah, sorry. Sorry. My head is kind of blocking it So games like that So my my hotas down there for some elite dangerous and flying sims, of course Because that's so much better than the mouse and keyboard. But yeah, that's what I do for fun Yeah, yeah, I've Starfield has been eating my life when I'm not parenting and not working so Yeah, I have managed to avoid it. It's been extremely difficult But I think it's also because I use this thing called Intel arc. You might have noticed it over here I saw my switch I switched away from the video to Intel arc and it turns out it doesn't actually run so great on Intel arc at the moment I don't know about the Linux situation in terms of Starfield, but I'm just I'm just holding holding off as long as I can I have so much other stuff to play and so much other things to do Yeah, we've we've definitely seen a resurgence in Both movie and video game releases since everyone's kind of recovered from from the pandemic and having to shift all that work to work from home to Certain offices going back into the office. And so it seems like there's so many triple a titles that have dropped this year. Yep It's it's no it's never ending. Yeah But yeah, that's that's awesome. We should probably have like a fedora gamers Community which we actually have an episode coming up here in the near future Where we'll be talking about valve and fedora gaming and that kind of thing which by the way Before we get into our topic today. I'm really excited because the last two weeks The marketing team and I really sat down and started having conversations about what do we want to talk about on the show? Who do we want to have on the show? So we actually sat down and Because I didn't know where else to put this we I created a HackMD file that is open to just about anybody with an account where we started planning out episodes where we started laying out topics and Last week we're going episode by episode figuring out what we were going to talk about now I am thrilled to announce that here It is the middle of September and we actually have every episode through the end of the year Scheduled with a guest in mind. We're ready to go. So I mean, we we've hit the big time if you ask me I mean, we've got video bumpers on the way. We've got audio bumpers on the way. We've got schedule So if there's anyone out there that can afford me I I could do this full-time I love fedora the getting to know the folks of the community Honestly, I do this as much for myself to learn about fedora as I do The those that watch either live or video or audio. So there's there's a ton going on I'm really really excited to share that with you a little under the weather today. So my excitement probably isn't coming through No, but like I was so ecstatic when I checked that list and you had Timothy and George that are gonna be coming on not to spoil anything to talk immutable operating systems If you're not familiar with George Castro, he's awesome. He does universal blue, which is on top of fedora It's just it's killer. It's so cool and Timothy is such a great guy He's helped me out so much with Fedora on X So, you know a big shout out to him as well, but yeah, you guys got a really good list Coming up in terms of guests. So Yeah, I think that's two episodes out. So about a month for now Our next episode will all will actually be meeting with the fedora community architect And he's watching life go figure glad to have you in the audience So he'll he'll be joining us here in about a month. I believe in two weeks Our next episode will be about The community and the community architect role So we'll be talking a little bit of a little bit more about who's involved and We'll take kind of a higher level view and then I believe the episode after that We'll be talking immutable operating systems Whether it's universal blue or silver blue. We'll probably give a shout out to onyx So joshua if you could stay up late with us love to have you in the chat for that Of course, yeah But uh, yeah with that said, why don't we dive into today's topic? I try to avoid the the meta topics about podcasting about the podcast So let's let's dive in and why don't you why don't you start with an introduction to what is budgie? Yeah, so I always try to pitch budgie desktop as like a feature rich flexible desktop environment not too flexible though because you you still want it to be approachable to your average user That strives to strike a balance between a traditional user experience metaphor While having sort of sensible defaults like this thing called a system tray Um, I like system trays. I like when I have things minimized and running in the background and they show up And I know what the status of them are Um, and then mixed with like fun and quirky features like raven, which is our widget and notification center Which I think is what a lot of people flock No, no bird puns intended. I promise Uh flock to budgie budgie 4 so Um, but yeah, that's that's basically budgie. Um, and uh It really sort of goes back to the days of of of volvo west So so for those who don't know like he docked he he actually is the creator of budgie desktop And he actually originally created it for a volvo west which was later rebranded to solace Um to sort of be an approachable traditional user experience that was lightweight So akin to sort of what we try to strive for nowadays a traditional metaphor that had sort of similar features and capabilities As say the genome 2 late genome 2 era and early genome shell now for those who don't know this was back in like 2013 Genome shell was brand new. It was it was kind of bare bones But they had like really cool stuff like old message trays Where you can like tide into Empathy and and see your real-time messages and that kind of stuff, but anyways So this was really early on that that really takes me back to the days of Like joining linux unplugged on a tuesday afternoon part of the jb the jupiter broadcasting network Actually got my podcasting start on linux unplugged. I used to hang out in the mumble room and uh And I chat with like I chat chat with folks like icky and and from there, you know grew into Into the pseudo show as no a show And then to you know, it's where I am today So you're you're really harkening back to back to the early days of my My more vendor and community focused part of my career Yeah, so the see the original goal behind budgie was sort of to to build it on top of genome components So, you know, that's mutter gdk Genome settings daemon that sort of thing instead of forking the entire ecosystem Which is kind of what we see with cinnamon nowadays and really started with the the cinnamon 2 era Which has its pros and cons but you know in terms of the the budgie metaphor sort of build a shell on top of the genome stack and You know ever since then it's taken really a life of its own So obviously the goals of it have evolved as the landscape has You know like a lot's happened in the decade since then in terms of linux ecosystem in terms of development capabilities Like if you were to ask me would linux be where it is today 10 years ago I probably would have said no Just because it would have been so crazy the capabilities of linux that we have nowadays for home users But it's evolved so much since then in terms of budgie Whether that's getting adopted And built on by others like uber into budgie And ultramarine linux and gecko linux and now fedora, which is really exciting And then when ike left solace in 2018 I took over as the budgie lead and continued working on it, of course And uh, just as a little bit history then in 2022 when I left solace I decided hey, let's try to really transform budgie from like this sort of product oriented philosophy where it's like catered to towards solace that and it happens to work For other operating systems To something that's really like platform oriented. So like vendor neutral all the way Build on top of it have fun go crazy break it if you want to it's your own thing um, and then get everybody involved from all these different operating systems and teams uh into sort of just one one Environment and one organization to really try to take budgie to the next level with leaven and beyond So I founded the buddies of budgie organization then so Gotcha, so when did uh, when did uh, budgie become an official, uh fedorespin? Well, so that happened just in fedora 38 if you could believe it. It's that recent I started working on it in fedora 37 um, I had installed it was I'm trying to remember how exactly it went But I think it was something like I was using endeavor os after I left solace to be completely honest I didn't immediately jump to fedora. Okay. Okay guys. I'm sorry. Um, you're here now. So we forgive you Exactly And he was like, you know, we don't have budgie desktop proper On on fedora these ultraman ultramarine lengths guys are doing an awesome job But you know, would it be so bad if like we had it officially? I was just like Neil You and your crazy ways and trying to convince me to do stuff. Fine fine How hard could it be? He's like, I'm willing to sponsor you like package sponsor you So I Here here I am. So I for fedora 37 cycle. I was like, okay. I'm gonna do budgie desktop and I had the end goal of We're gonna have a spin And then at some point when when at least I personally feel that the rpm os tree stuff is ready, which it is in my opinion Nowadays, we're gonna have an immutable variant so And that is the uh, that's onyx that you'd mentioned Yeah, I prefer I would prefer if it was just called like fedora budgie atomic But apparently we all have to invent these crazy names that nobody could remember So mine is onyx Yeah, I I feel your pain there. Uh, the the atomic branding both for fedora and for red hat are are a little bit, uh a little bit of a, uh We just yeah, it's one of those things we just don't talk about anymore Yeah, what was this atomic thing? Uh, anyways So you you mentioned buddies of budgie and we're we're going to go off off topic here for just a second Why don't you explain what the the buddies of budgie is? Yeah, so buddies of budgie is and Is an open source Organization that is actually fiscally hosted by open source collective, which is really cool Um, and its goal is basically to develop buddies to develop budgie desktop and to get a bunch of Traditionally downstreams as others might call them Um, so like, you know, the people from moving to budgie from soulless nowadays From you know now fedora Or gecko linux and so on and just bring them all in a really nice kumbaya moment and say hey Let's work on budgie desktop together. Let's make it try to suit everybody's use case And try to make it so not only can you guys build on budgie desktop to make it The experience that you want but everybody else can And then take it to the next level with 11 In terms of like separation of data and presentation layers and a lot in a lot of other crazy stuff Um, so and if you if you check it like what the ubuntu budgie people have done with their default experience and compare it to like The very stock fedora budgie spin you can see like they're they're night and day And i'm i'm genuinely proud that we could actually support both of those Um, so buddies of budgie kind of helps us keep that in check and make sure we always have a a platform vendor neutral oriented position towards budgie Compared to you know a product oriented approach yes so we kind of talked about uh some of the underlying features Using existing components to build a sort of a traditional desktop environment But from a end user perspective if i were to put my If i were to put my wife on fedora budgie, uh, what would be some of the standout features that she might enjoy? um to be quite honest I think the only standout feature would probably be raven And I think that's okay And the reason why I think that is okay is for example if I was to sell my wife on hey Let's let's switch you over to windows. I know you don't have all your software. Let's just theoretically pretend you do um over to Over to something running linux. I would want her on budgie because quite honestly with the default experience It feels a lot like windows And I don't that's necessarily a bad thing. It has a a menu That you use to launch your applications and you could quickly access You know the shutdown capabilities. You could quickly access your home folder and music and so on and you can launch applications And they show up as icons in the panel You can launch them you can favorite them and so on um and then of course there's a lot of flexibility But I feel like those are more for advanced users Users that want to tweak with their with their experience and you you perfect you can By just opening up budgie desktop settings But in terms of the traditional metaphor I I kind of pride on it being just not really anything special Because that in a way makes it kind of special Because at least compared to genome shell as an example and I don't want to throw shades on on genome shell here Like it's it's a very different user experience that a lot of people are just not going to understand And they're going to want a more traditional user experience and sort of budgie provides that Um akin to how I think kd plasma Would as well so Yeah, it's it's been difficult for me in my in my linux days to switch I'm I'm one of the most basic of users When it comes to a desktop environment Um, you know, I've I can find my way through through windows 11 through mac os through ipad os through genome kde and And can pretty much find my way around to what I need on just about any desktop. Is there anything that would Is just kind of a basic uh genome shell users I I've got maybe six add-ons that that I add to my to my fedora build But is there anything compelling that would that would move me from one de to another? For I wouldn't do this question was coming to be fair like for for for what what kind of user Are we talking super super simple? I I could I could run my fedora box using genome kde. Yes. Why why would I To be to be frank. Why would I switch to budgie? Yeah, I that's that's a that's a great question. Um that quite frankly I don't know if I have the answer to um because it's just sort of something I use and I can't imagine using anything else I I think it is that familiarity that I keep Harkening back to and it's not familiarity because Of the fact that I'm a developer of it But more familiarity because I know I could translate my user experience over to other operating systems quite easily like for example windows Um, but also something that really really always makes me love love budgie is raven I love being able to open it up and whether that's on the left or right hand side because it's configurable it has your ability to Do per per application volume control, which is really handy as like sort of a in place of a mixer You could do device switching You could of course get all your notifications there and that's they're cleanly grouped into like their applications and it's all It's all nice and organized and tidy and sort of kept away And only really needed when you actually want it and of course you have really fancy stuff like media playback controls Integrated in there that I I personally quite enjoy and I think users would as well if they if they were to give that a shot So I would say I would say benefits are an intro For gnomes moving from gnomeshell to budgie tray icons That's fair if you like if you like tray icons Um, I would say that there are two up-to-date desktop environments that you would probably want to use You'd probably want to use either plasma Or you'd want to use budgie. Yeah, yeah, there's mate in their cinnamon that sort of thing, but you know budgie So it low barrier low barrier of entry if you're coming to fedora from say like windows Yeah, exactly That's you which probably makes sense why I feel so at home in the gnomeshell because Before linux was my primary operating system. It was it was mac os so The the ui feels a lot like mac os and you can even add a few extensions and whatnot to make it feel even more like that But and of course you have tiling capabilities in in gnomeshell and you don't really have that in in mac os It's just sort of like throw your windows wherever Uh, so actually that's a current extension on mac os to allow me to do tiling Kind of an oversight on apple spart, but they're not open source. So You know, it is what it is Yeah, whereas for for me I I came from like When I was young this was back in like 2008. I had my first laptop It kept blue screening so I literally typed in free operating system because I was smart enough to know what that was And I came across ubuntu which had gnome 2 and I was like, yeah, this is close enough. It has a panel Right. I can launch my applications. I have my running stuff And then from there it was like plasma And eventually it was a little bit of gnomeshell, but this sort of traditional metaphor is always something that's been really pleasing to me Okay. Yeah, and uh, so we had a question come in If uh, budgie supports weyland that is a fantastic question And I'm I'm so happy if we're going to be talking about upcoming features Um, but I'll go ahead and answer that one So so weyland is something that's being worked on. So we have it in two different ways. So, uh, campbell jones aka sarah He is a fantastic, uh team member of buddies of budgie He's working on magpie, which is sort of the the window manager that we're going to be using for budgie 10 and 11 series Going going into the future And that is going to be using a wl roots based compositor For for weyland support and we are actually going to be going weyland only Um, so no x11 support At all nice So so that's the end goal and then of course we have uh evan maddock and of myself and and others on the team that are working on other components of budgie 10 series To move that to supporting weyland for example using like live xfce windowing to do the window tracking So but yes, weyland is coming. I want weyland as well. Trust me I I don't want to be on x Any more than anybody else wants to Uh, yeah, so very exciting times going into the future, but there's no eta on that sadly Um, it's just that's one of those things where it's ready when it's ready because we have to do that The portals and all that to make sure Um, things are actually well integrated and you can do screen sharing and and all that It's almost as if in a new what my next question was and that was going to be uh upcoming features So you mentioned weyland support is on its way. Is there anything, uh, what else is there that that you want to promote? Yeah, so uh as a caveat for for those that aren't aware So right now we're working on a lot of items for budgie 10 series Now budgie 10 is based off the gnome stack. He uses gdk. It uses gnome settings daemon And we've we've sort of forked some components as we've gone on like gnome control center into budgie control center And mutter into magpie But uh, we are focused more heavily on budgie 11 So what that means is like a lot of the things that I talk about when it comes to 10 series is more small quality of life things Keep things stable, but still allows us to focus on 11 and some of these big items So when I for for budgie upcoming for the 10 series, we have like tray icon scaling So you could have more granularity in how those scale if they scale to your panel Or if they look the same as your status icons as an example Our dark theme switch in budgie desktop settings now actually changes that Free desktop actually it technically changes the gnome key for color preferences. So that'll apply throughout You know a libidway to a lib handy and flat packed applications When that's supported So that's coming up improved fuzzy searching. So so you could just type Kind of gibberish, you know, still somehow find the application you want just by keywords. So that's kind of exciting And I'm going to be working on some features for budgie screenshot So I want to have it where you could configure The default save location for files And something else I'm going to be working on is the ability to choose What screens in budgie screenshots that you actually want to take a capture of because right now if you choose screen is just everything And I don't know about you eric, but for me everything means two 4k monitors and a 1080p one And nobody is going to read anything on a screenshot that I would take of that. So So being interested take I've got a single 4k widescreen right now and Yeah, if I do entire screen, it's unreadable. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So So I want to have it where you could just take a screenshot of one particular screen So but these are like small quality of life improvements that allow us to focus on Wayland support And also allow us to focus on budgie 11. So That's it. Is there anything Is there anything worth mentioning for the fedora linux? 39 release that's coming up. I had to remember what version we were on I actually eric. I just I was thinking I don't actually have anything to share about fedora 39 You know, I was originally going to release fedora onyx for 39, but now that you mention it I'm not sure I will Scared you off for fedora onyx for those that aren't aware Is a beautiful variant Effectively of the fedora budgie spin So it's similar to how, you know, we have a fedora katie spin and then we have fedora kina white We have fedora workstation and then we have fedora silver blue And this is the equivalent where we have fedora budgie spin and now we have fedora onyx So that builds on top of you know, rpm os tree You get pond man and toolbox and everything's flat packed and it's awesome And you should totally try it when it comes out But i'm very excited about that so Yes And so I like to I like to wrap up each of our discussions with with a call to action for our audiences And for for budgie, how can people get involved in Whether it's desktop development or testing how how can folks that are really really passionate about budgie jump in and lend a hand Yes, if you go on over to buddies a budgie dot org and you click the documentation Link in the header that'll link you to our documentation center Which is built with a docu source and there we have information about getting involved Whether that's you know, it's not necessarily coding if you're multi-lingual translation genuinely do help Because I think a key thing about accessibility Is also accessibility when it comes to understanding the user interface And I think that's a really big deal. So if you if you are multi-lingual translations always welcome Um, we even have budgie backgrounds. So if you're an artist I will I welcome contributions to the budgie backgrounds I know camo who leads that would be very excited about that too Um, but of course bugs, please file bugs. Don't don't pretend or like don't Soon we already know that they exist if you encounter a bug. Please report it because I I love I have a love hate relationship with bugs. I love when users report bugs I hate the bugs themselves But the the more we could do to squash them the better So because the only good bug is a dead bug And we did have one other question pop into the chat here and that is what what is raven you've you've hinted at it a few times Yeah, raven is our widget and notification center So if you were to to install sort of a stock budgie experience, uh, you would have like a raven trigger So it show us sort of like almost like a log out icon In the the bottom right hand corner you click it and it'll show a sidebar that comes in from the the right hand side and that'll have widgets and notifications as I already explained where you would have a calendar you would have Audio output and input management So both global and per application volume as well as input device and output device selection Which is really handy if Say you jump into a slack meeting and you realize oh, yeah It didn't really connect properly with my headphones and you you have to do this entire dance And then opening up the settings and switching devices. Nope do all that through raven um So you could do that and if you're listening to to music you can manage all that through through uh raven as well play pause That sort of stuff and and going back and forward so Awesome Well before we wrap up today, is there is there anything you want to you want to say you've you've literally got the mic in front of you So, uh, anything you would like to share with folks uh Go on over to buddy's budging follow on us on mastodon if you don't have a mastodon account Create one because the fedora project is also extremely active on there Um, the team behind that does a fantastic job. So I actually want to take a moment actually to promote the fedora mastodon Um, everything else is just sort of a side effect. Okay, so if you haven't done that go go ahead and please please do That's all All right. Well, if you if uh if you're catching us, uh Sorry, I forgot what I was saying there. Goodness The the good news is here here in the united states summer is on its way out so Very much looking forward to cooler whether just allergies or kind of a byproduct of that but You know, it is it is 77 degrees fahrenheit here today. Whereas two weeks ago was 105 degrees fahrenheit. So much improved But uh, I really want to thank you josh for for joining us and for talking about budgie and the the budgie spin Really excited to to kick the tires I've actually got a gpu and one of my one of my home servers now So I might spin it up in a virtual machine and uh, and I'd give it a test drive But yeah anytime you have any news or any new features or any any help you need from the From the community at large just reach out and more than happy to have you back on the show Yeah, thank you very much again for having me on it's always a pleasure to talk about budgie desktop and of course about uh, all the exciting stuff happening in in the fedora landscape. So Much appreciate it Awesome. Yeah, and in two weeks, uh, justin w o florie will be joining me He'll we'll be talking about building the fedora community and we'll be talking about the community architect position That'll be in two weeks on the youtube channel on tuesday at what is it about five p.m. Eastern And uh, if you listen to the audio podcast, that's usually out about About midnight gmt. It depends on on how quickly I get the show notes put together and do the post processing But still looking at how to automate that process because you know, we this is 2023 We should be able to do that in an automated fashion But until then If you uh, if you haven't already be sure to hit the subscribe button And hit the bell that way you get notified every time we go live But also we've been Publishing a couple at a time the talks from fedora flock 2023. Definitely check out those sessions. I've I've admittedly I've been listening to them In order to come up with new podcast topics. So But there's some great talks. I really wish I would have been in ireland Just just about a month ago Next year we'll be in the united states. So hopefully hoping to make that one but uh until then We'll be live again in two weeks and uh, look forward to hopefully having some video and audio bumpers to go with it So until then take care and we'll see you next time