This topic is intended to capture early testing of 24.10 (Oracular Oriole).
The desktop ISO for 24.10 can be found here
- May- Aug - development
- Aug 15- Feature freeze
- Sept 19 - Beta Testing
- Oct 03- Release Candidate
- Oct 10 - Final Release
If you have spare hardware (or a virtual machine or two) and don’t mind regularly reinstalling when (and I mean WHEN) 24.10 eats your installation then feel free to give your feedback here. Early testing will improve the final release
Please use http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/ for testing ISOs (just click the relevant links and there’s guides as you navigate the site)
Packages and hardware are meant to be tested also using QA trackers: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Roles/Tester
As the above page shows, probably the best way to get stuck in with testing is run Ubuntu 24.10 (either download or upgrade from 24.04 with update-manager -d ) as often as possible for usual tasks (bearing in mind that one’s productivity and data may be hampered by bugs on 24.10!) and reporting bugs with ubuntu-bug and ubuntu-bug package-name as you go.
Alternatively, there is always a huge backlog of bugs that need to be triaged (i.e., progressed towards being fixed), head to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad for a guide on getting started with that!
Use this query to see if your testing issue has been highlighted by others first before reporting.
This first post will be updated with the latest important info - so you don’t need to trawl through the posts. Remember - everything listed below is subject to change/removal and should not be used as indicative with the beta & later release.
draft release notes TBD.
Applets and mini-apps
For Ubuntu Budgie applets these can be tested via our daily PPA for 24.04 & 24.10:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/budgie-extras-daily && sudo apt upgrade
- The third-party applet budgie-sysmonitor-applet has received a number of new sensors and changes (v0.10.2). This has been backported to noble as well.
- showtime has a bug fix to ensure the applet can also display on multiple monitors
Budgie Desktop
- The latest budgie-desktop v10.9.2 forms the basis of our Oracular offering.
summary of the upstream notes
- Budgie Menu: We will now show applications which report as being Terminal-based (e.g.
Terminal=truein their desktop file). Users of applications like Neovim rejoice! - Budgie Run Dialog: Fixed a regression where our setting of skip pager and taskbar was not being called during construction, which resulted in it showing up in our task switchers (IconTasklist and Task List).
- Dialogs: Fixed end session dialogs blocking authentication dialogs.
- Notifications: Fixed an issue where a notification’s default action would be performed when the close button was clicked.
- Specification Compliance: Fixed an issue where we referred to the restart / reboot icon as “system-restart-symbolic” instead of “system-reboot-symbolic”. This should improve compatibility with icon themes while retaining our own icon as a fallback in the event the icon theme does not provide it.
- System Tray: Fixed an issue whereby some applications would not show with their intended icon. This is the result of such applications (e.g. Cinny and Tauon) being non-compliant with the StatusNotifierItem specification by providing absolute paths to icons instead of either an icon name or icon data.
- TabSwitcher: We will no longer show an empty switcher when there are no windows to actually switch between.
- Workspace Applet
- Fixed an issue where clicking a window icon would not perform an intended workspace switch.
- Fixed left scroll direction. In libxfce4windowing, our concept of “left” maps to their “down”, but “right” is still “right”.
- build: Re-hide warnings that were previously hidden in Meson < 1.4.0. In 1.4.0, it began to show warnings that are largely the result of bad C codegen in the Vala compiler, resulting in unreadable log spam and making it substantially more difficult to see actual warnings that need to be addressed.
- vapi: update to support libxfce4windowing 4.19.3
Other Improvements and Bug Fixes
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Our default layout has been revised to ensure a smooth transition later to our wayland offering. The X11 plank dock has been dropped. We have now the budgie-desktop dock styled with our Pocillo theme. The top-bar defaults to a dark bar theme.
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We now support the Apple image format .heif - such images can be seen through gThumb, Nemo and can be set as a wallpaper via budgie-control-center
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We now support the Jpeg-xl format .jxl - again such images can be seen through gThumb, Nemo and can be set as a wallpaper via budgie-control-center
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In 24.04 external deb packages were installed via gdebi. gdebi has now been dropped in favour of the updated snap-store that handles side-loading of deb packages.
Bug Fixes
- Budgie Control Center. Add picture button fails to select an image. This has been resolved by Ubuntu devs and is being SRUd to 24.04
Other Improvements
Raspberry Pi
Themes
Budgie Welcome
Our welcome app is automatically updated for all 22.04, 24.04 & 24.10 users
Additional
Areas to look out for
The Ubuntu release notes are to be found here
Packaging Updates
Whilst not immediately obvious, various packages need to be updated for a number of reasons, so this section lists what updates have been made and this needs extra testing to confirm no regressions:
- budgie-extras - weathershow. The icons and cities data file have been moved to the more logical /usr/share area used for data related areas. Previously they were in the /usr/lib area which is primarily for compile & executable code.
- budgie-session. Debian has split systemd into various component parts. budgie-session has been updated to correspond to this split request. This resolved build related issues.
- slick-greeter has received a number of refinements; v2.0.5 has been packaged by Ubuntu Budgie
- lightdm-settings has received a number of updates; v2.0.4 has been packaged by Ubuntu Budgie
