Desktop environment built on GNOME components but rejecting GNOME Shell's design, surviving its parent distribution's near-death and organizational rebirth.
Budgie is a desktop environment written in C and Vala, using GTK, Mutter, and other GNOME components. It features the Budgie Panel, Raven side panel for notifications and applets, and a traditional taskbar-based workflow. Budgie 11 plans to reduce GNOME dependency.
GNOME 3's radical redesign in 2011 left many users wanting a traditional desktop built with modern technology. While MATE forked GNOME 2 wholesale and Cinnamon forked GNOME Shell, Ikey Doherty took a different approach: build a new desktop environment that used GNOME's libraries and components but presented them in a traditional, user-friendly way.
Budgie was announced on December 14, 2013, and first released on February 17, 2014, as the default desktop for Doherty's Linux distribution, EvolveOS (later renamed Solus). Unlike MATE's preservation approach or Cinnamon's shell modification, Budgie was built from scratch using GNOME technologies — Mutter, GTK, and GLib — but with its own panel, applets, and desktop paradigm.
Budgie quickly proved popular beyond Solus. SparkyLinux and Manjaro adopted it in 2015. Arch Linux, Ubuntu, and Void Linux followed in 2016, with Ubuntu Budgie eventually becoming an official Canonical flavor. The desktop's appeal was its sweet spot: modern code with a traditional layout, lighter than GNOME Shell but more polished than XFCE.
The crisis came when Ikey Doherty stepped back from Solus development around 2019-2020, and the distribution nearly died. On January 1, 2022, Joshua Strobl — the most active remaining Budgie developer — resigned from Solus and established 'Buddies of Budgie,' a new independent organization for Budgie development. The desktop was now untethered from its parent distribution.
Under Buddies of Budgie, the project began planning Budgie 11 — a rewrite that would move from GNOME's increasingly opinionated libraries to a more flexible foundation, potentially using EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) or Qt. This would make Budgie truly independent of GNOME's development decisions.
Budgie desktop announced as default DE for EvolveOS
First public release of Budgie desktop
Ubuntu Budgie created; eventually becomes official Canonical flavor
Joshua Strobl founds Buddies of Budgie, separating Budgie from Solus
Budgie 10.8 released; planning begins for Budgie 11 rewrite
Budgie demonstrated a third path between forking GNOME 2 (MATE) and modifying GNOME Shell (Cinnamon): building a new desktop on GNOME's libraries. Its survival through Solus's near-death proved that a desktop environment can outlive its parent distribution when the community cares enough to reorganize.