Buddies of Budgie

Hey everyone! I hope the new year is treating you well so far. Been a fair bit busy here as I’m sure you can imagine, but I’d like to build on the Solus Team Change thread to break down a bunch of things.

First off, there is no negative impact (to Budgie) from my resignation from the Solus team. In fact, the reduced workload of not needing to maintain hundreds of packages, countless hours of testing, etc. can be put to use in other areas. While I will be starting a full-time job later this month (so while I do have a Patreon, it won’t be my sole source of income), I’ll still have plenty of time outside work to contribute to open source.

In the terms of what I’ll be actually working on, that is still Budgie! Here is everything I have done so far:

  1. I more or less hard forked Budgie and related software. The name is still the same and no, the issues can’t get carried over from the old repository (which has been the bane of Budgie’s existence for several years now), but the silver lining is way more flexibility. Budgie Desktop now lives on under a new GitHub Organization, Buddies of Budgie, as well as budgie-desktop-view and budgie-screensaver. This will be the same organization that will house all the components for Budgie 11 (which yes, is still planned to use EFL).
  2. I have set up Transifex which will house the translations. I have attempted to move over as many from the Solus Weblate as possible, but unfortunately there was some import errors with some of the languages, so I need to mess with those a bit. There no longer is a dedicated budgie-translations repo, but rather the translations are merged back into Budgie Desktop itself.
  3. I have set up a Matrix space to facilitate communication, collaboration, and engagement (regardless of whether or not you are a developer). This even includes some channels for support (when and where possible, not everyone will have the answer for their or your OS of choice) and screenshots.
  4. I have created a Discussions area in our Budgie Desktop repository that has a variety of topics, including things we’d like to see for Budgie 10 series (“Making Budgie 10 Fly Again”), beyond (website, talks for Budgie 11), etc. It isn’t a replacement for the issue tracker (that still exists on the new repo), but may be helpful either way.
  5. I have purchased the relevant domain (buddiesofbudgie.org) and will be working on some mockups for it. Site will be made in GatsbyJS and open source, feature a Help Center and developer documentation, and the obvious marketing for Budgie and OSes that use Budgie. Release announcements will go there too.
  6. I have already added two new teams: “Best Buds” and “Helpers”. “Best Buds” have the maintain permissions in the org, which means direct push access, issue triaging, even tagging releases (though for final QA I’d still like to be the one doing that :wink: ). @ilvipero is already in Best Buds, @fossfreedom has received an invite to it, and other past Budgie Desktop contributors that I know provide high quality code as well. Helpers may not be used as much, but is there to help some of the day-to-day operations (issue triaging) a bit easier for everyone else.

With this additional time and more open community to house Budgie, I feel comfortable with re-opening Budgie 10 series for new features and goodies, and less just being about maintaining it until whenever Budgie 11 is ready. It is certainly possible that not everything will carry over from 10 to 11, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make 10 the best it can be in the meantime.

You can get some ideas of what I would like at the very least here, but this isn’t just about me. We’re all Budgie users, so I would love your feedback there too. This may include, should the Ubuntu Budgie folks want to, merges of some of their applets into existing ones and improving any UX along the way, merging some into official Budgie Desktop (shuffler anyone?). Includes Raven API, new internal theme that I’ll be working on, and more. While this all actually has to be coded, the point is to at least open the door to it. Not every idea or every applet will get merged, I still believe in downstreams like Ubuntu Budgie being able to provide value-add and make their slice of Budgie and Linux tempting to others.

But what I want to provide is a platform, not a product. No “you need to use every one of these apps to get the best experience, you have to use our theme and widget library to best integrate” but rather make Budgie able to be as reasonably flexible as it can (still some ownership / responsibility on other projects). We are not building an ecosystem of applications, we are encouraging everyone else to build what they like in a way that respects all Linux desktop environments. Folks from EndeavourOS, Fedora, GeckoLinux & OpenSUSE, and of course Ubuntu Budgie should feel encouraged to get involved. Eventually Serpent OS (my new home) when it is ready and usable. Less silos and more collaboration.

Let me know your thoughts!

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I really do love this direction as yes - it has felt like Budgie 10 still has some life left in it while things get rebuilt under 11.

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Thanks Josh, a great vision.

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