Budgie is a new desktop environment that has been making quite a few waves into the Linux community. It's used to power the Solus operating system, and a new version has been released, pushing the version number to 8.2.

Solus is still under development, and it remains in this state for the next few months. On the other hand, Budgie seems to be much more stable. Developers are still making important improvements to it, which in turn directly reflect in the Solus distro. Even if Budgie is featured on in this Linux OS, it doesn't mean that it can't be installed in another one as well. Arch Linux is just one example, and others might follow.

In order to get a stable and complete operating system, Budgie developers need to make sure that their desktop environment is ready to be used in a multitude of situations, on various hardware configurations, and by regular users who just want a familiar experience. Budgie uses a design that is not all that different from what we already have in the Linux ecosystem, but it's modern and fresh.

Budgie 8.2 is a big step forward

The desktop environment is the most visible part of any Linux distribution, and it needs to make a good impression. The fact that Budgie already looks great is a plus for Solus, but the developers also need to make it versatile and stable enough for shipping.

According to the changelog detailed by developers for Softpedia, a minimum of GTK/Mutter 3.14 is now required and the 3.16 branch is used for development, old 3.10 workarounds for Ubuntu 14.04 have been dropped, along with the support for this OS, numerous stability and performance changes have been implemented, new style notifications have been implemented, right-click has been brought back, and the entire desktop should now run much smoother.

These are just a few of the major changes in Budgie 8.2; you can find the rest on Github. You can also download the source packages for Budgie 8.2 from Softpedia, but the fastest way of testing it is by downloading Solus and upgrading it to the latest version.