Softpedia has been informed today, April 17, 2016, by David Mohammed about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate (RC) build of the soon-to-become Ubuntu Budgie flavor.

We believe that you are already aware of the fact that there's a GNU/Linux distribution out there called Budgie-Remix built around the Budgie desktop environment created by the Solus Project, which wants to become the next official flavor of the popular Ubuntu Linux under the name of Ubuntu Budgie.

Of course, this won't be possible until at least the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle starts, which will happen later this spring. But for now, the developer prepares to unveil the final version of Budgie Remix 16.04, as part of next week's Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, and you can now test-drive the Release Candidate.

"Our Release Candidate for budgie-remix has been released. We are nearly there for the 16.04 release - it's looking good so far," said David Mohammed, Budgie-Remix developer. "Its been a dream start for this distro. Never would we have imagined that there would have been thousands of testers so far."

What's new in Budgie-Remix 16.04 RC

Since Beta 2, the developers managed to update the slideshow of the Ubiquity graphical installer, revise some of the options of the installer, center the clock applet on the panel, remove budgie-xfdashboard by default, add the Plank dock by default, as well as make GNOME Calendar the default calendar app.

Moreover, the pop-up notifications have been made visible to the end-user, the Plymouth boot splash screen fallback correctly displays the current name of the distro (Budgie-Remix), the Budgie Desktop logo is now displayed on the panel, and users can select the Vertex theme from the Raven notification/customization center.

Lastly, it looks like you'll be able to apply either of the Arc or Vertex themes for the Plank dock via its preferences dialog, the wireless notification pop-up dialog is now visible when the NetworkManager tool attempts to make a network connection, and there's better support for renaming Home folders when using a non-English language.