 Back in 2017 when I returned to Linux full-time my very first distribution was a Buntube Budgie Now I didn't stick with the Buntube Budgie for very long. I was very much a How would you put it a very prominent distro hopper? I like to have I don't think at that point in my Linux career I stand at a distro for longer than two weeks for at least a year like I was hopping all the time and A lot of some of that was just because I wanted to try out new things at the beginning It was because I didn't really understand the concept of desktop environments being not tied to the distro that I was on So I kind of figured I had to reinstall Linux. I was a noob I mean even more of a noob then than I am now so it was it was bad But my very first distro that I tried was a Buntube Budgie. I don't even think that it was a flavor at that point I think it was actually like a remix But I tried it and I liked it a lot and then I ended up I think actually installing Solis Linux which is the home of Budgie at the time and I really like Budgie Budgie was probably my favorite desktop environment that I tried at that point until I actually got Truly into KDE the problem is is that I have not used Budgie since then right? I have not actually set down Install the distribution and actively installed Budgie alongside it probably since late 2017 Maybe even you know early 2018 or so so it has been at least four years Since I've done that maybe five years, right? It's been quite a while So I thought well, you know it's time to take another look at Budgie now The thing that surprised me the most even though I have been kind of following the news when it comes to the whole Development of Budgie is that they're still basically on the same version of Budgie They were at when I tried it way back when so there hasn't been much in terms of Phenomenal development when it comes to this desktop environment now that doesn't mean things haven't changed they have a little bit But it's definitely not brands making news So before we jump in to taking a look at Budgie today If you could be so kind as to leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it really does help the channel so today we're gonna actually take a look at Budgie from a Returning point of view like I'm returning to this after having used it a long time ago. So I want to see Exactly what's changed and see if it's still as good as I remember it So let's go ahead and jump right on in so I chose to install Budgie on Endeavor OS Now I know that this is not the purest Budgie experience that you can get that'd be solace and there's a chance that I may try that out again someday But solace is really in flux right now because they're kind of Reinventing themselves and they're going through some developer Turnover and stuff like that over the course of the last few months So I want to give that stuff kind of a chance to settle down before I even decide to take a look at that distribution again But Budgie itself seems to be fairly stable They do have a plan to make some changes some rather radical changes in the future But that's not here yet. So let's go ahead and take a look at how Budgie is right now So my first thing that I noticed right out of the bat is that it hasn't changed that much in terms of actual design It still has the bar along the bottom very Windows like in terms of UI right from the beginning. So you have the menu down here at the bottom Which is I believe that this is is this the whisker menu. Is this the same thing that that XFC has it may be something similar to that. I'm not actually sure there's a name for this I don't think it's actually the whisker menu, but it's similar to that right and this was kind of what made Budgie the thing back in the day that I had this really cool menu Whereas other GTK based distributions didn't really have a good menu because it's basically when I first installed this The reason why it felt like it was so good is because I had heard stories about GNOME 3 at the time and Those stories weren't always all that positive. Let's just put it that way So the windows like aspect of this had always appealed to me at the beginning because I had been coming from Windows So the UI right from the beginning really hasn't changed all that much if you have used it in the past Has the menu here along the side some pinned applications and then a system tray along the other side now Another thing that has always made Budgie different than all the rest is that it has something called the Raven menu I think this is still called the Raven menu and basically what they have here is a section for widgets Which I've never really seen expanded at all I'm not sure if there are other widgets that you can actually add to this if they've ever actually added any I know when then I first used it This was basically all there was and as I can see that still feels like that's all there is now Maybe there's a way you can add more I'll take a look at that here in a minute and then obviously there's a notification pane here as well now It used to be that the settings for the Raven menu and the settings for the the actual desktop environment were in two separate places I don't see that anymore because there used to be like a settings button here somewhere But there doesn't seem to be a place for that now. So maybe there's not So let's go ahead and actually take a look at the settings now if I remember right this is basically a Fork or at least a re-implementation of GNOME tweaks So a lot of the stuff here if you've ever used GNOME tweaks will look very very familiar So it allows you to change the style which is basically the theme You can change to a dark theme if you want Which is just an arc dark theme you can control whether has animations here Now all the stuff here was here before You can have desktop icons all the stuff in GNOME would normally require a whole bunch of So this is more of a An addition something that they've made their own because these are not genome extensions. This is actually built into The desktop environment. So I don't want to continue to compare this to GNOME because it is not GNOME But it has a lot of similarities to GNOME because it's been based on gtk Now it won't always be that way But they do have a lot of similarities here, which is why some of this stuff here is it feels like they've taken the Stuff that they figured GNOME was missing and baked it into their desktop environment So it feels Kind of like a GNOME version that has GNOME tweaks installed It kind of feels like that way, but it's not and it felt like that Back in the day too. Now see I switched back and forth I started on budgie Then went and tried a few other things and then came back to budgie because it always worked really really well It was very very snappy back in the day and some of the other desktop environments that I tried weren't so snappy So I always came back to this so I did gunner some experience with GNOME at the time because at that point GNOME was really really slow and Coming back to this which felt like it was GNOME but better, right? If that's what it felt like back in the day Now it is its own thing. So I don't want to keep Saying that But it definitely still has that kind of vibe to it like this is this feels like a GNOME, but Significantly improved, right? So you can get desktop icons You can show your mounted drives and the home directory and stuff on the desktop as well as you want You can change the icon size the ribbon menu settings are Here and there are actually ways of adding widgets. So let's see what other widgets they got. So they don't have That's I mean, that's not a wide selection, but you know, that's better than none at all So let's actually open that up see if that actually added it right away, which it did So that's cool It would I mean given the fact that they've had a widget panel here for many many years You think that they have more than just you know five widgets But the fact that they have some I guess is good, right? It's better than it was before which they had none You can change some settings here for the ravings You can actually change it to the right side if you wanted to or the left side So if you do this it comes out over there, but the button stays in the same place That's interesting. I think you probably could change that by altering the panel That'd be a little weird because I was expecting it to be here And you can change the sort of the notifications as well The the windows settings here would be to add these buttons and stuff that you know, takes out or gtk takes out I should say and then also you can change the panel for right from here as well So you can change the settings. So if I wanted to move this to the top, I could move it to the top I can change the size so I can make it smaller if I wanted to change the spacing Automatically hide adds and transparency shadows stylize the region add hit add a hint to the panel So that each of the panels three main areas can be themed differently That's pretty cool gives you some options for theming and you can change it to dock mode. So it'll look like that That's actually pretty cool as well. I think I remember that setting from before And then you can change it you can add another panel if you wanted to add More than one panel and then there's just autostars. So that's really all the settings that there is So the the most surprising things to me coming back to this is that there's not more Right, you know, no, that's not a bad thing. I'm not criticizing it, but you a lot of times the longer A desktop environment exists the more settings and cruft that it kind of Garners over the years, right? KDE is a fantastic example of this and it always has been right the longer that thing exists the more options that it has That's just kind of kde's thing, right? Canom kind of goes the option directions the longer it exists the fewer options that it has right So the fact that this is kind of just kind of maintained a steady course over the course of the years intervening between the last time I used it Is I think a good thing because it does kind of give you that stability knowing that the stuff here That you would expect to be here is here It isn't constantly growing and adding a whole bunch of features that it doesn't actually need So that's actually kind of nice now Other than that, there are a few things that confuse me. So this right here if you have ever used ganome before Is something that you'll have very much recognized, right? This right here is the ganome settings panel Now they have obviously made some changes to this But this is definitely the ganome settings panel and you would be confused considering the fact that we just Went through an entire panel that was called the settings, but no This is also the settings. So they If you remember, right? I remember I remember back in the day that the ravens panel the raven panel here Had its own settings and that was the thing that we just looked at that was the raven panel settings before I think if I remember right and then there was this thing here as well This thing here they call the budgie control center. So this is just the traditional this This is going to have all your settings for your hardware And your sharing and your applications and things like that your wall But you change your wallpaper from here and things like that So we don't actually need to go through that because that's like that really is just the ganome Settings panel odd enough that it does not follow the theme, but that's okay Now they have added several budgie tools. So one of them is a budgie screenshot tool. So that looks like this That didn't exist the last time I was doing it. Although and you guys gotta remember I don't use ganome at all But does that not look like an old version of the ganome? Screenshot tool might be wrong about that. I might be just remiss remembering that But that's one thing So that's basically budgie as it is right? There's some icons up here that you can can go through like the Notification thing also just brings up the Raven menu like it did before that's for the network connection. That's network manager and That's really all there is to budgie now you can kind of see That not much has changed if you've watched if you've seen this before now Oddly, I don't think that normally you'd see no wallpapers here. I was going to change the wallpaper I think that's an endeavor OS thing. I think you have to install the endeavor OS wallpapers separately But you know, that's kind of beside the point. So as you can see, that's a very simple desktop environment, right? There's not much to it But they also have still some of the same quirks that they had back when I used it way back when the bifurcation of settings is still Weird to me like it feels like they have two different ways of doing things and Some of them are theirs, which is definitely still a clone or at least a re-implementation of genom tweaks and then they have the genom settings panel, which they call the bud Budgie software center, right or budgie settings center or whatever it was control panel Maybe that's what they called it, right and they have those two things and that's really what makes budgie budgie so My thought way back when was that it was a better version Of genom, right? It had all of the features that genom continually pulled out It was very very snappy and it continues to be so And it's just a very Good desktop environment that kind of emulates the way windows works in terms of Ui and feel it that's the menu and it's got the bar and the panel and all that stuff That you'd be familiar with if you've ever used windows before so it has all that stuff and it Is a very comfy desktop environment the thing about budgie has always been Is that it feels unstable to me not the software what I mean is the development of it? So they have gone through several different Developers over the years and they they've been attached to Solace now they're not attached to solace anymore and the the development does now seem to be a little bit more stable It's one guy that's in charge of it and I'm sure there's more people that are working on it But you know, he's now re-involved himself with solace. So is you know, is it going to stay separate? Nobody I mean, I don't really know, you know, so so and the development work behind it has been very Up and down and you can tell that by the fact that it still basically looks functions and has all the same features as it did Basically five years ago It hasn't really moved all that much and one of the things that I want to talk about before I go Is that they have had many different plans? so when I was using it and I was still you know very much of a fan of it I was reading about how they had plans to move it from g2k to qt because they've never really been happy With g2k because it's very controlled by the genom foundation and all that stuff, right? They've never really been happy with it So they had plans. I don't know if they were plans for very long or not I don't really remember they had plans for moving from g2k to qt Those plans were were scraped and they were planning on doing that at version 11, right? So version 11 was in the plans Way back in 2017 when I worked when I used budgie the first time They're still not at virgin 11 by the way and that's five or six years later And now the plan is not to go to qt, but to go to the enlightenment libraries Which is something completely different and not something that is well used so my Worry over budgie has always been that it's just going to stay the same and while there's nothing wrong with saying the same It also means that if they're continually working on something new and better in terms of upgrading it to something different Are they really working on the thing that exists right now? You know it kind of worries me a little bit because it doesn't show much progress It doesn't show like the things that bugged me back then Especially the two different settings panel still exists here six years later And you know, maybe that's just the way they want it, which is fine But it always felt weird to me like if I wanted to change just the setting of one thing I'd go to one settings panel if I wanted to change the settings of another thing I'd go to another one and that was always a little weird and it still remains a little weird so budgie is a Desktop environment that is kind of frozen in time even though it's still technically being developed So that's my takeaway of of budgie. It is Not bad. It's definitely not a bad desktop environment But it's definitely not something that is really something that I'd be interested in but Here's the thing and we always have to keep this in mind every time I review a desktop environment I'm not a person who uses desktop environments all that much anymore. I'm more of a window manager guy So just kind of keep that in mind my opinion may or may not hold weight when it comes to this kind of thing So I hope you enjoy my little tour of budgie if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I know I probably should have looked at it on solace because that's the Kind of the place where budgie kind of lives But like I said, I'm still kind of waiting for that to settle down just a little bit So anyways thoughts on budgie in the comment section below if you haven't already give this video a thumbs up I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel You can follow me on master down odyssey. 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