As announced a week ago in the March 2017 Update post, a Budgie edition of Antorca is being developed. It includes most of the same applications like Rhythmbox, VLC media player, Firefox, etc. Antorca’s web browser and office suite installers exist in both too! However additional applications from the GNOME project have been added, such as Cheese, Maps, Weather, and Clocks.

Budgie Desktop’s reliance on the GNOME software stack has proven to be somewhat of a headache. There appear to be 3 different places one can change the login screen background (but only the LightDM configuration app works), 2 to change your desktop background, 2 to change the functionality of your desktop.

Adding custom wallpaper for the Budgie Desktop will require a bit more work. GNOME’s wallpaper configuration only shows wallpapers supported via XML sheets. This is madness (compared to Xfce). I am not entirely sure whether it’s worth it to implement my own custom XML sheet to support Antorca’s custom wallpapers.

On the bright side, I find the Budgie Desktop to be extremely refreshing compared to many of the other desktops out there at the moment. The desktop could be reorganised to work a little like Chrome OS’s ‘taskbar’ or even to look like MATE’s (as is how Antorca Budgie’s desktop is currently layed out). Performance wise, it blows Cinnamon, GNOME, and KDE out of the water. However as it is still in its infancy, there aren’t an awful lot of extensions for Budgie’s panelling system compared to GNOME’s.

I’m beginning to wonder whether my outburst about Thunar’s ‘Delete’ option (one thing I have yet to point out is why I’d rather not just replace Thunar but keep the Xfce desktop – I just prefer to keep things as default as they were, i.e. Thunar was designed for the Xfce desktop in the first place!). MATE is on par with Xfce in terms of performance and customizability, however its file manager (Caja) has a similar feature as Thunar’s.

So in the end, perhaps I exaggerated and jumped on to the Budgie bandwagon a little early. It’s a fantastic desktop, but Xfce’s maturity, extensibility, and customisability has ensured its place as Antorca’s primary desktop environment. The Budgie edition may not receive as much attention for now but I’ll continue work on it, albeit slowly and carefully.