Ikey Doherty, the developer of Evolve OS has announced that a new iteration of his new desktop environment Budgie has been released and it's packing quite a few new features.

It will be a while until Evolve OS is released, and there are still many components that need to be put in place before this new Linux distribution is ready for regular users.

One of the most important aspects of Evolve OS that really sets the distribution apart from everything else is the new desktop environment that's being developed by the same author. It has a more conservative approach to the design desktop paradigm, but at the same time he's using modern tools and concepts to make it work.

Most Linux developers usually adopt one of the many desktop environments that are already out there, but Ikey Doherty decided that he could do better than what was already available. Right now, there are two major DEs that could be construed of using the same kind of design, MATE and Cinnamon, but they actually look older and more cluttered.

"To put it briefly, we added notifications support (Big thanks to Josh Klar for his help!), added an initial X11 tray (notification area) which will eventually be superseded by appindicator support, fixed a fair few bugs with session and widgets, and Budgie Popovers now use "native" GtkPopover styling, even though they're not. In short, it allows the sexiness of your theme to continue with Budgie," said Ikey Doherty on his blog.

According to the changelog, a new notification daemon has been implemented (check the screenshots), the popover rendering is native, volume control is now available via the new settings, it's now possible to change the volume with the mouse scroll, the integration with GNOME clock settings has been completed, and many more changes have been implemented.

You can give Evolve OS a try right now (it's still in the Alpha stages), but you can also use PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.10. Also, the Arch Linux users will find the new desktop environment in the AUR repository.

Even in this incipient phase, Budgie Desktop 7 looks better than many of the alternatives that can be found right now on other OSes and from what we've seen so far, it will get even better.

You can download the source package right now from Softpedia or the binary packages for Ubuntu and Arch Linux.