Please be aware I already deleted Ubuntu Budgie and reverted to stock standard Ubuntu, and I don’t have exact pointers for where these things were. Given that I found all of these bugs in only 30 minutes, it shouldn’t be hard to find these on your own, and it shouldn’t be difficult to find new ones.
Ubuntu Budgie 24.04 and 25.10 were my first experiences with Budgie, and I have nothing but fond memories of the two. Unfortunately, because of a bug with the top bar preventing me from using my second monitor, I decided to leave Ubuntu Budgie behind for stock standard Ubuntu. Now that I am voluntarily giving up my second monitor, and now with Wayland support being added to Budgie, I felt that it was time to return.
To say that I was disappointed is…an understatement.
Ubuntu 26.04 is rough, unfinished, and sloppy. My first action was to switch from the default MacOS-esque layout to traditional Budgie, something more in line with Solus, KDE, or Windows. One of the first changes I noticed is that the transparent dock of 25.10 and older has been replaced with Plank. When you use the preinstalled app to quickly switch layouts, it doesn’t kill Plank. Plank still runs, there’s just a taskbar below it. In other words, there was a MacOS dock floating above a Windows taskbar. I am struggling to think of any reason as to why the developers missed this bug other than they didn’t ever think to try switching layouts (as they encourage on the front page of their website) or just general laziness.
The AppMenu wouldn’t take focus away from whatever Window was active. I’ve never seen this before and I truly hope it’s a bug rather than an intentional design choice.
Trying to overlook that glaring oversight, Firefox and Floorp (Snap and Flatpak respectively) both completely halted when installing extensions. Budgie didn’t alert me that the task was frozen until I killed it using system monitor. This meant no adblock, no extension based password manager, and no site customization, all being critical to my workflow. Why this is the case with this specific distribution and no other distributions, I don’t know. But I feel that it’s hard to blame anything other than the one distribution I encountered this error in.
With my patience with this distribution waning, I tried distracting myself from that issue by going through settings to try and find a way to disable Plank. That’s when I found in one of the settings apps (the exact one slips my mind) there is the MATE logo. If this were lifted from Ubuntu MATE and had the respective logo, I might’ve cared a lot less, as it’s still an Ubuntu logo. But it’s embarrassing that Ubuntu Budgie, an official Ubuntu spin, had left a logo from an unrelated project in their work with poor contrast with the logo’s background. While this is a small detail, it’s indicative of a quality control issue on part of the developers. The Budgie desktop environment has barely changed since Ubuntu Budgie became an official spin, to the point I used a screenshot of Ubuntu 22.04 at the beginning, and it looks entirely identical to 25.10 AND 24.04. Given the lack of changes the Ubuntu Budgie team needs to deal with (in comparison to other spins, that is), it’s absurd that any of these issues still exist.
I get that Ubuntu Budgie is one of the smaller spins, maybe as small as Ubuntu Unity, but the one time the main change behind Ubuntu Budgie has an upgrade, being an update to the Budgie desktop environment, you should be able to update it in the default install without it breaking everything. The brokenness of this release will be felt for years, as this is an LTS release. Why they didn’t skip 26.04 in the same way Ubuntu Unity skipped 25.10, I don’t know. Some of the issues with browsers and the actual desktop environment could’ve been fixed with a few extra days of squashing bugs. The fact that I’m finding these over a month after 26.04 released tells me that this spin’s devs are indifferent to the quality of the work they oversee and do not care enough to fix it.
I do not believe that the consequences of this particular spin being buggy are isolated, either. It makes Canonical look like they have lack of oversight on its spins and quality assurance, making Canonical look bad. It also makes Budgie look very buggy. If it were some Arch based distro that was buggy, this really wouldn’t matter, but because this is an official variant of the largest and most prominent desktop Linux distribution, it has serious implications for Buddies of Budgie. Ubuntu Budgie’s devs need to fix their act and push bug fixes now, or they need to call quits on this spin.
Sincerely,
A disappointed fan.
Some things I forgot to add
A lot of these things could be easily fixed with terminal work, yes. However, the purpose of Ubuntu is to make Linux usable without ever needing the terminal. Ubuntu devs work hard so that Ubuntu users don’t have to. If this is too much for these devs, I suggest they make this spin independent and/or rebase on Manjaro/EndeavourOS.