Budgie 10.7 Desktop Environment Adds Dual-GPU Support, New Power Dialog

This release also introduces a new application indexer and a new pluggable widget API system for the Raven widget and notification center.
Budgie 10.7

Budgie desktop lead developer Joshua Strobl announced today the general availability of Budgie 10.7 as the latest stable update in the Budgie 10 series of this modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distribution based on the GNOME Stack.

Budgie 10.7 arrives ten mounts after the Budgie 10.6 release and promises a more polished user experience thanks to the implementation of dual-GPU support in the Budgie Menu, allowing users to launch apps with a dedicated graphics card out of the box.

The Budgie Menu also received a new “personal user menu” feature that promises to let you open a file manager straight to predefined directories like Home, Documents, Download, Video, or Music. Moreover, Budgie Menu now features new buttons for launching Settings, Control Center, and the new Power Dialog.

The new Power Dialog makes it easier to access common actions like reboot, shutdown, log out, lock, hibernate, or suspend. The devs note the fact that the hibernation action is dynamically enabled or disabled based on supported hardware and it’s offered as a compile-time option on GNU/Linux distributions that don’t provide hibernation support out-of-the-box, such as Fedora Linux.

Also new is a Budgie Screenshot feature that’s built into the desktop environment itself, allowing you to quickly take screenshots of your screen, windows, or selected areas. This deprecated the dependency on the gnome-screenshot utility, which has been replaced upstream with a similar screenshot feature.

Budgie 10.7 also introduces a new application indexer to provide more reliable indexing of apps across multiple directories, a revamped widget selection in Settings to display relevant developer information, as well as new and improved Raven widgets, including a Usage Monitor minimalistic widget that displays CPU, RAM, and Swap usage.

The Budgie Run Dialog has been updated as well in this release to leverage the new application indexer. Budgie 10.7 also brings significant improvements to the notifications system and a new pluggable widget API system to the Raven widget and notification center for extensibility.

“Like our Budgie Panel widget API, you can now build widgets for Raven leveraging libpeas (providing support for writing plugins in C, Python, and Vala) and our set of APIs. This finally achieves our end goal for Raven since the beginning of Budgie 10, which has been to provide an extensible widget and notification center,” said Joshua Strobl.

Check out the release notes for all the details you need to know about the changes implemented in the Budgie 10.7 desktop environment, which should arrive soon in the stable software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution.

Budgie 10.7 will also be offered as the default desktop environment in the upcoming Ubuntu Budgie 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) and Fedora Linux 38 Budgie Spin this spring in late April 2023.

Image credits: Joshua Strobl

Last updated 1 year ago

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