budgie-desktop has just received its latest update (v10.2.5) – and its packed full of rather nice tasty stuff. So forget about your choccy easter eggs – delve in, update and enjoy.

The main panel has been rather nicely been fixed up. Notable visual changes includes the ability to blend the panel applets with the panel itself – a visual treat in itself.

The whole panel nicely reveal itself on logon – so no messy icons changing its size. The applets no longer re-arrange themselves at random as well. Hurray!

If you have pinned your apps to the panel, these task icons (right of the start button) gets a nice hover effect – just inviting you to click on them.

Last but not least is bluetooth support – if you have bluetooth – you get to see a nice new bluetooth icon with the other panel system indicators (battery/sound/exit).

Raven sound descriptions are much more useful – especially for those users who have multiple sound cards.

The General Settings has undergone a dramatic revamp – you can switch on and off desktop icons as well as fiddle with cursor themes and all sorts of fonts. You can now remove gnome-tweak tool. Yay!

The panel settings has a new option called “Stylize regions” – for ubuntu users it is off so that the applets blend in to the panel itself. For those yearning for the clear visual distinction – click to switch back on.

Other behind the scenes changes include:

fix-ups for ultra high resolution users – the panel correctly sizes itself

GTK+ 3.20 support. So for those users using the latest 16.04 Gnome-3 Staging PPA, budgie-desktop will work just nice for you!

The minimum GTK requirements are now GTK+3.18 – so sorry 15.10 Ubuntu Users … time to upgrade (on April 24th if you are of a nervous disposition)

Don’t forget – you need to use the budgie-remix PPA from now on.

For users who are new to budgie-desktop:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:budgie-remix/ppa sudo apt update sudo apt install -y budgie-desktop

Note – this will update Nautilus to v3.18 as well which does not have the Unity patches. To remove budgie-desktop:

sudo apt install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:budgie-remix/ppa

budgie-remix beta 2 is up next – this will include this new release of budgie-desktop.