The path for 22.04 LTS - planning

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The road to 22.04

Our next release is a long-term support release. We will be planning to support the release for a minimum of 3 years.

What this means is that collectively, critical and stability issues are prioritised and resolved ensuring that you can concentrate on what matters most - using your desktop for both fun and productive things!

Each LTS release is the combined effort of all the releases since the previous LTS - so 20.10 / 21.04 & 21.10 as well as the 22.04 development cycle itself. It is for the LTS upgraders - both early adopters in April 2022 and notified users in July/August 22.04 who will see the benefit of all the effort of the whole community for these two years.

With that in mind, the Ubuntu Budgie team focus is primarily around ensuring we have a stable desktop as possible rather than the wiz-bang approach for each of the interim releases.

Not that stops us - as a community & team having fun!

The following areas will for the path towards the 22.04 release. Each area you can contribute to - don’t be shy - just raise your hand.

Progress to 22.04

The following areas are the teams main focus for 22.04

  1. Investigate Canonical’s new installer - what it does/how it does it / try it etc
  2. Enable Nemo tracker and investigate what it does/how it works/any potential issues. Will enable a 21.10 PPA for anyone who wants to help with this investigation. EDIT: This is not possible until this is resolved Port to tracker-3 ¡ Issue #2834 ¡ linuxmint/nemo ¡ GitHub
  3. Expand the team: Generally we need enthusiastic people to join - people who want to make a difference bringing whatever skills they currently have to enable Ubuntu Budgie to ‘fly’
  4. New github based Ubuntu Budgie website. The whole website should be static markdown pages based. This will enable everyone to contribute to the website via a standard git pull request. Nikola is leading with this.
  5. Infrastructure overhaul - website: we have had a number of outages over the last few months. The website needs to be fully resilient. Plans are afoot to resolve. Dustin and Nate are leading with this.
  6. Infrastructure overhaul - continuous integration: We need to get better to find potential issues earlier and faster. Dustin and Nate are leading with this.
  7. Evaluate GNOME 41/42 apps and the libadwaita issues - those apps with “fixed adwaita theme only” most probably be dropped from our default install.

Areas that needs help a little help to rewrite:

A goal for 22.04: rewrite old applets to todays standards.

  1. Clockworks (python)
  2. budgie-dropby (python)
  3. budgie-kangaroo (python)
  4. budgie-takeabreak (python)
  5. budgie-workspace-stopwatch (python)

Areas that are in urgent need to be rewritten:

  1. budgie-countdown (with gsettings reset issue)
  2. budgie-keyboard-autoswitch (outdated polling concept)
  3. budgie-recently-used (outdated concept!)
  4. budgie-trash (weak concept/design issues)

Candidates to be drop

  1. budgie-wmover (terribly outdated concept)
  2. budgie-wsoverview (terribly outdated concept, should we even keep it?)
  3. budgie-applauncher (doesnt seem to be any call for this)

If we are intending to drop/create stuff then we should basically bump budgie-extras from v1.x to v2.x - that will indicate a major rethink/rework

Areas of enhancement

  1. Make indicator-datetime (and its ayatana equiv) an acceptable exception for our appindicator applet to allow its use - this supports integrated Evolution & Thunderbird (via a plugin) tasks & appointments etc EDIT - DONE
  2. Test our ayatana support under Ubuntu Budgie - if there isn’t any conflicts lets move our budgie-indicator-applet to fully ayatana compatible. Using this as the driver Raven Calendar (or clock/calendar app in panel) showing all Evolution appointments and tasks - #18 by Alyana
  3. Examine plank and its patching to see if it can be resolved why external monitor resolution changes results in Plank “floating” up the screen. Alternatively, explore improving on Budgie panel-as-dock. Test David’s patches for multi monitor initial support.
  4. Evaluate current packages the make up Ubuntu Budgie. Likely to be dropped is GNOME-Firmware since it is really a specialist piece of software rather than applies to a wide audience. EDIT: GNOME Firmware now dropped

Community led:

The following areas we would like a member of the community to lead - remember hands up folk:

  1. Community Gaming - update welcome to add to the Lutris & Steam gaming page. EDIT: ONGOING
  2. Gesture support - libinput-gestures as a project - how best to integrate and/or make available as an option.
  3. Translations - add & update translations in Transifex Log in ¡ Transifex
  4. Help produce a “Yaru Budgie” i.e.add budgie elements to the Yaru GTK Theme project Help needed to produce Yaru Budgie

Stretch goals

  1. Examine EFL - what is it? Examples to use? How to develop/compile etc.
  2. Rust - seems to be some call here - Rust bindings for EFL/Gtk - so might be worth spending some effort developing a noddy budgie-applet - this will demonstrate creating bindings for libpeas and budgie gir stuff.
  3. Relook at print screen related issues - possibly include in our in-development stream the ability to print-screen banded sections of screen.
  4. Relook at multimonitor budgie panel support - we have a patch in Git that allows for static monitor layouts. Can it be worked on to support external monitor disconnections?
  5. Nouveau Optimus support of our appmenu - i.e. right click and choose to use intel or nouveau to run apps/games: EDIT - MERGED - NEEDS TESTING VIA DAILY PPA

Known 22.04 workstreams

  1. GNOME 41/42 integration
  2. Possibly budgie-desktop 10.5.4 (if released by upstream COP Feb 2022) - or a series of patches for the above on a 10.5.3 base
  3. Release our 22.04 raspberry pi - support arrangements. Is there any interest in a LTS type release or are budgie raspi users just interested in the latest and greatest? … i.e. move quickly on to 22.10/23.04 etc
  4. Refresh GTK themes and icon themes from the latest maintainer releases - EDIT ONGOING
  5. Uplift nemo plugins with 5.x once nemo 5.x enters the archive
  6. Installer Slideshow desperately needs a refresh with new screenshots and updated wording.
  7. Desktop wallpaper - either run a competition … or “choose the best from 20.10-21.10”
  8. Formalise project structure/accountability
  9. Release Notes for 22.04 for 21.10 upgraders
  10. Release Notes for 22.04 for 20.04 upgraders - this is a combination of the 20.10-22.04 release notes
  11. Release budgie-welcome updates with more translation support - need to continually test against 20.04 LTS base as well as 22.10. EDIT ONGOING
  12. Remove more deprecated ubuntu budgie version stuff from budgie-welcome and html files + configuration e.g. remove 20.10 and 21.04 (Jan onwards) to clean up and shrink the snap size.
4 Likes
3

I have not installed 21.10 anywhere yet, but as soon as I do, I’d like to test nemo+tracker.

This might be linked with budgie-recently-used ?

Which trash-applet are you talking about here ?
…the most recent one at least can delete :wink:

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Installing the daily build now , nice to be testing again ! I took a break for 21.10 due to building a new desktop pc.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: How do I download the daily build?

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I really like what I read. Seems like Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 will be a great one.

Just one thing. libinput-gestures already work on Budgie with a reasonable amount of configuration for things like switching workspaces or sending current window to a different workspace, maybe even maximizing/unmaximizing some windows.

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All - disappointingly, nemo (and I note a few other GNOME apps Improve data sandboxing by using Tracker 3 (#17) ¡ Issues ¡ GNOME / Initiatives ¡ GitLab)has not yet been ported to the new tracker-3 standard Port to tracker-3 ¡ Issue #2834 ¡ linuxmint/nemo ¡ GitHub so investigation into adding tracker support is stalled.

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Yes, for daily work, 22.04 (Budgie) RPI LTS is a big wish. On other SD-Cards, user can install what’s new and from interest. Raspberry can be used very flexible!

  1. Release our 22.04 raspberry pi - support arrangements. Is there any interest in a LTS type release or are budgie raspi users just interested in the latest and greatest? … i.e. move quickly on to 22.10/23.04 etc
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Looking forward to this, although the current version has been working very well.
Will 22.04 move from 5.13 to 5.14 kernel?

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The raspi kernel is currently the 5.15 kernel for 22.04. Kernel freeze is in a couple of weeks time. I don’t expect any change for the kernel version for the release.

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