We've just been informed this morning by Joshua Strobl from the Solus Project about the general availability of the Budgie 10.2.9 desktop environment for Solus and other supported GNU/Linux distributions.

While the development of the massive Budgie 11 release is ongoing, it would appear the Solus devs have been working on some improvements for the current stable implementation of the lightweight desktop environment based on the GNOME Stack. And it looks like Budgie 10.2.9 might just be one of the last maintenance updates before Budgie 11 hits the streets, which could happen sometime in early 2017.

Several parts of the Budgie Desktop received attention from the developers, including the Raven notification center, which now displays a confirmation dialog if you accidentally remove one of the existing panels, it's a lot easier to reset the configuration of the Budgie Panel, and there's better detection of HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) screens.

"This is solely a bug fix release, tackling some niggling issues before our focus shifts to development of Budgie 11," said Joshua Strobl, Solus Project Communications Manager. "HiDPI has improved for Budgie 10.2.9. When we detect a HiDPI change, whether it be from the user, or system, deciding to enforce a new scaling factor for the UI, we now re-assert our struts and position."

Arabic and Chinese languages are now officially supported in Budgie

It also looks like the Run Dialog received some attention from the development team, improving the launch of various applications like the Gedit text editor or Corebird native Twitter client, the recently introduced Places applet got fixes for MTP mounts, detection of root directory bookmarks, and checking of duplicate dirs that contain accented characters in their names.

Various of the Budgie Panel widgets have been improved as well in Budgie 10.2.9, an issue with the spinning wheel rotating for 30 seconds after a program was launched is now resolved for the Icon Tasklist, as well as an issue with the keyboard layout for the Simplified Chinese locale. Speaking of which, Chinese and Arabic languages are now officially supported in Budgie, and various other translations were updated.

Budgie 10.2.9 is available right now for Solus users, so all you have to do to get the goodies listed above is to update your installations via either the command-line with "sudo eopkg up" or Software Center. The new Budgie release is also live in the OBS repos maintained by the Solus team for Fedora 22, 23, and 24, as well as OpenSuSE Leap 42.1 and 42.2, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's coming soon to Arch Linux too.