2024 was a pivotal year for Budgie Desktop, with our Budgie 10.9 release series and our focus on our move to Wayland. Time to dive into our State of the Budgie to recap our efforts in 2024 and the goals for 2025.
It is soo crazy that there are still Cinnamon, Budgie, XFCE, LXDE and basically LXQt with no Wayland support.
While KDE and GNOME have it literally for years.
Fedora has Wayland by default for GNOME since 25, which is 7 years ago!
Edit: I know that the others have plans, but they are not ready, after 7 years!
LXQt is in theory usable but still shipped with XOrg. Cinnamon too, mainly XOrg, the Wayland session has issues like wrong keyboard layout (tried it). XFCE? No idea.
It is soo crazy that there are still Cinnamon, Budgie, XFCE, LXDE and basically LXQt with no Wayland support.
While KDE and GNOME have it literally for years.
Fedora has Wayland by default for GNOME since 25, which is 7 years ago!
Edit: I know that the others have plans, but they are not ready, after 7 years!
LXQt is in theory usable but still shipped with XOrg. Cinnamon too, mainly XOrg, the Wayland session has issues like wrong keyboard layout (tried it). XFCE? No idea.
The only one that doesn’t have it at all, or don’t plan for it, is lxde and mate. Every other DE has some form of support coming over.
True, Mate is there too.
Yes I know that they all have some plans. But it has literally been 7 years!
LXDE is dead.
LXQT is working on it, and I believe are already shipping some initial version: https://lxqt-project.org/release/2024/11/05/release-lxqt-2-1-0/
XFCE 4.20 introduced initial Wayland Support: https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1734220800
Cinnamon has an experimental Wayland Session: https://9to5linux.com/cinnamon-6-0-desktop-environment-arrives-with-initial-wayland-support
Budgie, as per the article, will be Wayland-only from Budgie 10.10, to be released in Q1 2025.
So I’d say the Wayland transition will be complete for all in either 2025 or 2026 at the latest.
lxqt and cinnamon do support it to a large extend though? LXDE and Budgie are barely alive projects so its not really surprising.