Possible changes / enhancements for 20.10

We are currently planning the areas the team are considering for 20.10 in October.

Whilst I know this topic will potentially turn into a wishlist - I am genuinely interested in any thoughts you have where Ubuntu Budgie should concentrate on in the future.

So drop your thoughts here. Try to keep one wishlist per post. Upvote ideas by hitting the “love” button. As always - if you think you have the talent (I know you have!) then offers of help to implement are more likely to move a wishlist into reality.


The list here will be amended where the team thinks there is a potential (and its only a potential) for enhancements:

  • Drag & drop windows to move them to another workspace.
    We have the window mover, but its code is due to an update. Moving windows seems furthermore more user friendly from a list of windows than window by window -> either add it to previews as a(n) optional drag&drop bar, or as a right-click option to visualspace, or both.
  • Another one for previews: see if we can make keeping ctrl pressed, but switch from tab to above-tab, previews switch to another stack with either all or app-specific window overview.
  • Look at gestures - https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures
  • Application Menu - lets be bottom bar friendly - so the search/powerstrip should be at the bottom of the grid view if the menu is located on a panel located at the bottom of the screen
  • Convert Cinnamon Screensaver to be budgie friendly https://github.com/UbuntuBudgie/cinnamon-screensaver
  • Add an option to hot corners settings to hide the icon in the panel. Hot corner definitions will therefore be via the applet settings
  • the themes options in “welcome”. have a “try” option - and/or possibly a “save/restore” options.
  • the layouts options in “welcome”. have a “try” option - and/or possibly a “save/restore” options.
  • revisit the screenshot code in budgie-desktop to see if it can be made more flexible - user defined screenshot tool, mapping to all the combinations of screenshot available in Settings - Keyboard
  • Uplift to budgie-desktop 10.5.2 - also backport to 20.04 LTS users
  • Dynamically enable keyboard shortcuts/remove shortcuts if previews / shuffler are enabled/disabled i.e. so that you dont have to logout and login.
  • Shuffler: create option for screen partitioning - per application or all.
  • Shuffler: add option to set toggle-maximize within set margins (requires bookkeeping if we want to toggle to original sizes)
  • Dropby: make the popup position a setting
  • All non-translated budgie-extras applets to have translatable strings - so our transifex community can contribute translations
  • Start to look at third-party applets - can we help in anyway for those third-party upstreams to have translated applets

From a topic on UB that I agree on: I would like to see the currently connected bluetooth device in the panel when clicking the bluetooth icon. When none are connected the trusted one. And 2 buttons to connect, disconnect.

As an example: I LOVE how it is done with WIFI. Similar to that would be awesome

Regarding

I would be willing to help out coding it. But would need help getting it set up into my(?) github.

6 Likes

Sounds reasonable - this should be raised anyway (if its not already) on the upstream issue tracker (https://github.com/solus-project/budgie-desktop) - if we as a community can help to implement it then the better!

1 Like

In like fashion, if you have no bluetooth devices and are not expecting to have any, you should be able to turn off Bluetooth easily and have it remain off on subsequent boots. I shouldn’t have to completely uninstall bluez to get the Bluetooth icon to go away and stay gone.

2 Likes

Ok, I came to talk about gestures. But I see you covered it.

Other areas, would love see see the dev on shuffler continue to be refined. It’s just getting better and better.

I want to get our themes get into the “common themes” snap for better theme support on snap packages. But I have been waiting to see how small dev is it going to deal with themes long term. Am alternative (we I know they are getting concerned with that package size) might be to do a damp specific to our themes. But, I need to understand how the file access needs to work for strict confinement.

I saw a budgie applet for switching between Intel and Nvidia GPUs. Thought that would be worth a look.

Better AMD support. And by this just making it easier for users. I need to refine my thoughts here .

Still thinking. Haha.

Oh, and add the ephemeral browser to the welcome app. Especially since there is a snap now.

ah - well that can be done right away!

Example of the changes are here https://github.com/UbuntuBudgie/budgie-welcome/commit/4a7d217b4c80828d8df3bcc82876671294a00798#diff-92b287b008d04a7ee9a07ed282b4d7d7

For the moment we are shipping out of the box with mate-optimus that gives that capability

1 Like

Add a vertical line (if plank is used horizontal) and horizontal line separator (if plank is used vertical) for the plank dock. A user can currently add them by creating a .desktop file and finding an appropriate .svg file. Anyway to make that a bit easier?

@zilexa There are a lot of Plank themes available at Gnome Look here. The Plank theme files are also very easily to adapt, I have done so myself here.

Thanks, indeed many themes, but none of them inform me whether there is a separator available. So I could spend hours trying themes, while I am not interested in deviating from the default theme.

This is just about user friendliness. I created the separators on my default Budgie plank by using these files: https://www.deviantart.com/glacto/art/Drk-Plank-Theme-with-separator-631813715 and rotating the .svg file for my vertical Plank.

More than happy to see a pull request against Pocillo for this https://github.com/UbuntuBudgie/pocillo-gtk-theme/tree/master/src/plank

@Rinzwind I could not agree more. Additionally, I would personally prefer to have the different indicators in separate applets for more flexibility when positioning them (but that’s a nitpick).

Select the Full Keyboard with edit and function keys by default when Ubuntu Budgie is installed on a laptop (a computer with internal monitor) so that functional keys like brightness, mic, volume work out of the box.

Quicknotes is great, but perhaps nice to have a seperate app in addition to see all your notes? or have a simple sidebar with a plus button to add a note?

Replace Gedit as current Text Editor for Pluma (a fork of Gedit, used in Mate) as it is a bit more user friendly with a simple but neat toolbar, without becoming a full fledged editor (keeping it simple). Having them open side-by-side, Pluma seems to fit the aesthetics of Budgie better.

2 Likes

WinKey+H is nowhere near as good as being able to go to a corner eg bottom left and the window is minimized. Consider expanding the options in a more user friendly way for applet; I notice windows shuffler is now being used, which sadly indicates the hotcorners applet would need too much work, but having a double job eg hotcorner then shuffler makes the functions more complex for some users. Ive just had a play with shuffler and its annoying IMHO, so Im back to Winkey+H without the hotcorner applet.

Replace Clock for Calendar applet, showing the calendar when you click on the clock. I understand the applet is from a 3rd party, but this is such a basic thing, worth to invest in?

6 Likes

Allow hotcorners actions without having to add the hotcorners applet to the Panel. This is really a configure-once-never-touch-again thing. Why show an icon on the Panel constantly?

3 Likes

Allow to add items to Raven, a couple of examples:

  • show notifications below the current last item (the entire bottom half of Raven is empty when no music is plaing).
  • Allow to change the default music app that is launched when clicking the “play some music” button, even a streaming music app like Spotify.
  • Show your recent (Quick-) Notes.
  • show a calculator.
2 Likes