Budgie 10.10 has been released with Wayland migration and major architectural upgrades

Budgie 10.10 has been released as the newest version of the open-source desktop environment for Linux. While this update continues Budgie’s tradition of a user-friendly interface, it marks the project's first migration from the X11 graphical system to Wayland. The development team focused on making this transition seamless, ensuring that the user experience remains consistent with previous releases.

Building on these changes, the architectural shift introduces a protocol-first, compositor-agnostic framework. Budgie is now decoupled from specific window managers, which enables potential support for alternative compositors in future versions. This protocol-first approach is designed to give developers and users more flexibility when experimenting with window managers.

Alongside the compositor migration, many applets were updated to support Wayland, with several new features and visual enhancements added. The panel now uses layer-shell for anchoring to screen edges and improves start, center, and end section logic to dynamically compute heights and widths. As a result, inner applets like the Tasklist trigger overflow behaviors more reliably. Other core components, including Desktop View, Control Center, and Session, have also been revised to ensure Wayland compatibility.

Looking ahead, Budgie 10.10 will be available in Fedora 44 and Ubuntu Budgie 26.04, later reaching additional Linux distributions. This release is the final major update for the Budgie 10.x series, as development shifts to Budgie 11.