Unlike previous testing calls - we are now looking for experienced testers who want to help the both the UB and BuddiesOfBudgie teams with early testing of our Wayland offering. This should NOT be used who want a stable system.
You can test via either a 25.04 or a 25.10 install
There are now two types of development ISOs for 25.10 - monthly snapshots and dailies
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Snapshots have gone through a growing list of automated testing, which the dailies only have a bare minimum. The first snapshot has been produced - more info about snapshots is here
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The daily desktop ISO for 25.10 can be found here .
For the moment Wayland testing is only on a 25.04 base. We will update this topic when we have 25.10 wayland packages available
If you have spare hardware (or a virtual machine or two) and don’t mind regularly reinstalling when (and I mean WHEN) this testing phase eats your installation then feel free to give your feedback here. Early testing will improve the final release
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 this preproduction release.
Do not report bugs to launchpad - all issues should be reported here and we will advise whether to also report to our upstream
draft release notes.
Testing Budgie Desktop with Labwc
For Ubuntu Budgie with Wayland this can be tested via our development only PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/wayland-test && sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install budgie-daemon-v2 engrampa crystal-dock
sudo apt purge nemo-fileroller
sudo apt autoremove
reboot --
Notes
- Qt based apps now better integrate with out desktop. Specifically Qt6 based apps that support kcolorscheme to style dark/light. This opens budgie to lots of new apps. You dont have to limit yourself to Gtk based apps. Let us know those Qt apps that you have tried. Screenshots please!
- Crystal Dock is an exciting development that has recently received labwc & wayfire support. You can start this via the menu option. Let us know your thoughts. If we have positive feedback then we’ll work with the project maintainer to go through the process to upload to Debian & Ubuntu in 26.04 development time-scales.
- Display Management is not available at the moment
- Budgie Control Center options should display only those options that upstream intend to be wayland compatible. We need testers to try as many options as possible and let us know whether there are options that do not work.
- Keyboard Layout applet - this does not work at the moment. Keyboard layout switching is available via Alt+Shift
- Compatible applets - use the PPA to test those packages that have been converted to be wayland compatible. We’ll be updating the PPA over this cycle with more applets that we consider are wayland compatible. Do check and test. If your favourite budgie applet is not available in the PPA it has not been converted - or will not be converted to be wayland compatible. Packages in “wayland test” : wayland test : “Ubuntu Budgie Developers” team
- Panel applet popups do not auto-close when clicking on another window - they will only close when clicking on the panel or opening another applet. This is a deficiency of GTK-3 popups.
- The default desktop layout has changed to a single bar. Upstream has not currently found a way to enable full Intellihide of the dock - and as such this negates one of the key features. See though above for crystal-dock which enables intellihide for full-screen apps. If this proves successful we could revert back to the bar-dock combination again.
- We have switched to using engrampa for graphical archive operations such as compressing, extracting etc. Engrampa is a GTK3 application that themes out-of-the-box. nemo-fileroller / file-roller has been dropped.
10. We noticed the right-click on the desktop to show the nemo-desktop menu options is not themed. As to why - no idea - would love folk to help here. Workaround is to edit/add the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and put this in it:
Testing Budgie with Wayfire
Wayfire is a great compositor if you like subtle animations. Via wayfire.ini you can configure other effects like the cube to switch workspaces.
If you would like to help with making wayfire a first-class citizen just let us know. Here is a repo to get you going with budgie + wayfire
Creating Budgie with Sway
Let us know if you have an interest in helping to develop Budgie with Sway
Creating Budgie with Hyprland
Let us know if you have an interest in helping to develop Budgie with Hyprland
Budgie with Miriway
If you have an interest in using Budgie with Mir/Miriway then this repo has the setup for this window manager. Again - let us know your interest in helping to develop this variant.