Ever since it made its presence known in the Linux space, Ubuntu Budgie has always stood out from the crowd. This is not surprising since I am a big fan of Ubuntu in general (despite not being totally on board with all the latest decisions regarding snap apps and so forth).
Powered by Ubuntu at its core, and smoothly integrating the Budgie Desktop environment with its cool applets and general user-friendly tools and features, Ubuntu Budgie is a very unique proposition in the line-up of official Ubuntu flavors.
Following the release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) rolled out with a lot of interesting changes and upgrades meant to make it even better than it was.
Besides the basic changes borrowed from the official Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release, this version of Budgie adds extensive improvements to the beloved Welcome App, various Apple upgrades, a lot of desktop tweaks and refinements, and, as expected, toolkit updates.
For starters, let’s talk about the infamous Budgie Welcome. There are tons of translation fixes, and implementation of core22 (meant to offer smoother compatibility with future versions of Ubuntu, and has benefits for reducing the ISO size).
There’s also a small menu option change in the sense that “Budgie Themes & Layouts” has been changed to “Budgie Makeovers & Layouts,” and the Welcome app now features links to the project’s Matrix community and Mastodon instance.
Apart from updated translations, most of the pre-installed applets have received some sort of change/tweak/improvement.
For instance, the Bluetooth applet has been completely redesigned, Budgie Trash has been better integrated into the mainline Budgie Desktop, the Clockwork applet now better displays 24hrs formats, and the Weather applet has new icons (which look better on both light and dark themes).
This latest LTS release of Ubuntu Budgie ships with the latest Budgie Desktop 10.9.1. The least obvious changes are probably related to the TabSwitcher and Workspace applets, as well as the adoption of StatusNotifier support for the system tray.
The default window manager is now called Magpie. If it looks a bit familiar it’s because it’s actually a soft-fort of Mutter (the version shipped by GNOME 43). Since we’re on the window manager subject, it’s worth noting that Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS is X11-based only, even though the developers pointed out that future versions of Budgie Desktop will transition fully to Wayland.
Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS features (as expected) Ubuntu’s new Flutter-based installer which, I have to say, goes perfectly with the distros cool looks. MATE Calc has replaced GNOME Calculator, PipeWire is now the default audio/video backend replacing PulseAudio, and Budgie now offers support for WebP images out-of-the-box.
For those upgrading from 22.04 LTS, the changes to 24.04 LTS are pretty substantial. In fact, the changes are pretty impressive even when upgrading from 23.10.
Having said that, Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS is here to stay for three years, and what a release it is. Is it worth checking out Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 LTS? I would have said that it’s worth checking out even before this release, but now I can say that you’re doing yourself a disservice by not giving it a try if you’re looking for a modern Ubuntu-based distro as your “daily driver.”
Last but not least, a bit of acknowledgment for the team behind this amazing Ubuntu flavor. Not only for their work but also for the fact that Ubuntu Budgie’s release notes are as thorough as a professional accountant’s ledger.
