The road to 24.04
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 22.10 / 23.04 & 23.10 as well as the 24.04 development cycle itself. It is for the LTS upgraders - both early adopters in April 2024 and notified users in July/August 22.04.1 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 24.04 release. Each area you can contribute to - don’t be shy - just raise your hand.
Progress to 24.04
The following areas are the teams main focus for 24.04 - happy to elaborate on any of these - just shout.
As always - plans can - and will change - and all of these areas can only be done with those who have the drive and ambition to make things happen.
- Work with Canonical to create an official raspi image
- Look to stream-line the raspi image - possibly start from the desktop-minimal seed and build from there
- Package budgie desktop v10.9
- Website community contributions - need to get the community involved
- More proactive on social media singing - key to grow the community
- Keep on-top of theme (GTK + Icon) updates
- Release new version of desktopfolder
- Continue to integrate new installer updates.
- Work with Canonical to develop a budgie specific component of the new installer
- Lets see if we can knock off anymore budgie-extra issue/bugs for the LTS release
- Look to replace GNOME Software with “App Center” snap. This will need installer slide tweaks to words and a picture
- New UB store to purchase all things UB
- Budgie-welcome - link to new store + words and pictures
- November - Community Wallpaper competition
- Package key components from various upstreams;
- slick-greeter
- Lightdm-settings
- Nemo plugins
- Upstream: Look across GNOME GCC Gitlab for commits that can be worked into BCC
- Fractional scaling support - we depend on Canonical’s mutter additions to the schema. Whether Canonical keep fractional scaling support for the X-server version of mutter is an open question we need to get an answer for. Better we look to reworking the current magpie fractional scaling patch to not depend on Canonical’s gsetting schema key - that has the bonus of opening up fractional scaling for other budgie distros. Kudos for us
- Upstream: Look across GNOME Mutter for commits made to the GNOME 43 branch and work into magpie 0.x
- Upstream: Look across GNOME Mutter in general (44 and later) and decide (risk/balance) if should be incorporated into magpie 0.x
- Evaluate GNOME 45 version of the adwaita iconset that will be uplifted in the 24.04 dev cycle. May icon themes have adwaita as their last resort. GNOME 45 removes many stock icons - so there maybe visual breakages that need to be resolved - reporting to upstreams etc.
Stretch and future goals
- Work with Canonical to see if we can create an immutable desktop
- Upstream: look at magpie v1 + budgie 10.x [24.10 target]
- Upstream: look at Qt developments and their implications [24.10/25.04 target]
- Opportunity for a budding flutter developer - refresh the new installer slides. Currently a nominal structure. Needs the “simplicity and elegance” motto to be applied to showcase UB.