Budgie 10.10.4 lands with Wayland panel auto-hide and dock mode finally working
Budgie 10.10.4 is out, and it finally fixes the desktop's most persistent UI bug.
Budgie 10.10.4 arrived today. Lead developer Joshua Strobl called it a "bug fix release," but the headline fix is the one that had users waiting since Budgie went Wayland-only in January: auto-hiding panels and dock mode now actually work. Six weeks after 10.10.3, this is the fourth minor release in the 10.10 series, shipping 20 commits with 3,046 lines added and 1,846 removed across 45 files. Strobl noted the release "makes automatic and intelligent hiding work on Wayland, reworks dock mode, lets you switch Raven views with the keyboard, adds a shortcut for showing your panels, and more."
The cadence is worth a look. Budgie 10.10 was declared maintenance mode at its January launch while the team pivoted to Budgie 11, a from-scratch re-architecture in C++, Qt6, QML, and Rust. Still, 10.10.1 through 10.10.4 keep landing on a steady schedule. Maintenance mode hasn't stalled anything.
The dock finally works
Under the old X11 display server, Budgie could ask exactly how big and where each window sat. It used that to decide when an "intelligent" panel should slip behind an overlapping window. Wayland quietly removed that ability. Budgie still gets its window list through the wlr-foreign-toplevel-management protocol, which tells it whether a window is maximized and on which monitor. Not its size. Not its position. So the overlap logic broke.
Through 10.10.3, an "Intelligent" panel would hide behind a maximized window and stay trapped there until you un-maximized it. "Automatic" wouldn't hide at all, and docks kept reserving their entire edge. It was quirky to say the least.
Ten point ten point four essentially rebuilds the panel code. A hidden panel now hovers above your windows but stays invisible except for a 3px strip along its edge. Slide the mouse into that strip and the panel returns. Click elsewhere and the click passes straight through to whatever's underneath.
The hiding policies had to change, too, since the panel can't check overlaps anymore. "Automatic" now hides whenever any window on the monitor is maximized. "Intelligent" hides only while the focused window is maximized.
There's handling for fullscreen apps as well. Touch the screen edge during a fullscreen video and the panel pops up. Games that lock your pointer are left alone, as long as your compositor implements the pointer constraints protocol.
And if you've ever wanted to yank your panels up over a fullscreen app without digging through settings, Super+T now toggles every panel on screen. Pressing Super when you open the Budgie Menu also calls up every panel, not just the menu's own.
Other wins worth noting
Raven, Budgie's unified notification and widget sidebar, can now be driven by the keyboard while open. Super+A jumps to widgets, Super+N to notifications, and hitting the shortcut for whichever view is active closes Raven.
The labwc bridge got a few behaviors back. Super+Shift+arrow moves windows between monitors the way it did in 10.9. Picture-in-Picture windows from Firefox stay on top, and a left-click on the desktop now only focuses it. Previously that opened labwc's root menu, which is how you'd end up with accidental launches from a touchpad tap-and-drag. Right-click still opens that menu.
You can also pick how long before the screen dims, anything from 30 seconds to 30 minutes, or zero to disable it, and choose between gtklock and swaylock as your screen locker. Both are heading to a future Budgie Control Center via GSettings; until then it's the command line.
Budgie also sped up how the panel starts, and unusually, it published the receipts. Instead of the menu, tasklist, and autostart page each rescanning your installed apps independently, the panel now loads that list once and shares it. Budgie's own numbers, first 90 seconds, 281 apps, two runs per build, show main-thread scan time dropping from roughly 200ms to 22ms. Work under g_app_info_get_all fell from 94ms to 10ms in one run. Peak heap crept up slightly, to 16.23MB, because the shared list sticks around for the panel's lifetime.
They published benchmark figures for a startup tweak. Most desktop projects don't. It's a rather aggressive optimization for a desktop in maintenance mode, though the numbers are real. Most users will just notice the panel feeling snappier on a cold start, and that's enough.
Developers can now run the panel from a build directory through meson devenv without installing.
The bug fixes round out the release. Applets that vanished in non-English languages now stick around after the fix stored a module key the panel prefers over the translated name. A broken applet no longer leaves a panel stranded. The Bluetooth applet's settings button opens whichever of Bluejay, Blueman, or Budgie Control Center you have installed. There are also workarounds that only show up after leaving X11 behind: the mouse pointer is visible again in VMware, and older X11-only Qt apps and AppImages can launch once more. All of it is just what you get when you move display servers.
Budgie itself remains a curious case. Created by Ikey Doherty for the Solus distro and now run by the independent Buddies of Budgie, it sits close to GNOME's stack without being tied to any single distribution. There's no reference platform, so the look shifts depending on which distro installs it. That flexibility sells, but it also means your Budgie might not look like your neighbor's.
Budgie 10.10.x is trickling into distro repos as packagers catch up. Fedora 44 ships 10.10.2 and Fedora 45 is set for 10.10.3, so 10.10.4 will arrive via updates. Ubuntu Budgie 26.04 LTS ships 10.10.2 and is Wayland-only. Solus is on 10.10.3. You can also drop it onto an existing install with sudo apt install ubuntu-budgie-desktop or sudo dnf install budgie-desktop.
Head here to the GitHub release. The project runs on Open Collective donations, which fund the ongoing work and the parallel development of Budgie 11.
