Testing Budgie

This document provides high-level documentation on testing the latest changes to Budgie Desktop. Whenever possible, we recommend that when reporting an issue with Budgie Desktop that you first test with the latest available version of Budgie Desktop, if not the latest in-development changes, to see if the issue is already resolved.

Please look at our GitHub releases to confirm the latest version. You can compare this against the version you have installed by running:

budgie-desktop --version

Git Builds

Some distros provide up-to-date "git" versions of each component. If possible please try these packages on a separate machine / in a virtual machine.

Arch

Arch Linux typically has the latest stable version in the Community repository. You can test with the latest git master of Budgie by installing the budgie-desktop-git AUR package using an AUR helper like yay or paru. Make sure to update your system before installing budgie-desktop-git, and reinstall the official budgie-desktop package once you have finished testing.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu provides a daily built PPA based on the latest available stable release - LTS releases are not necessarily the latest stable.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/budgie-desktop-test
sudo apt-get update
reboot --

To remove the PPA and return to the distro provided package, run:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/budgie-desktop-test
reboot --

---

For other distributions than those listed above, you will need to follow the steps at Building Budgie Desktop.

Testing

There are several components that you may encounter throughout usage or testing of Budgie Desktop.

Name	Description	Supports --replace
budgie-daemon	Budgie Daemon is a background process responsible for many activities such as notification handling, XDG Directory monitorying, screenshot invoking, tab switching, and more.	✅
budgie-desktop-settings	Budgie Desktop Settings is the graphical application for configuration of our desktop environment.	❌
budgie-panel	This component handles one of more visual panels, which includes Raven and panel applets.	✅
budgie-wm	Budgie WM is our window manager that sits as a Meta "plugin" on top of Mutter.	✅

Restarting components

It is common when testing Budgie Desktop to restart various components. When doing so, the --replace flag is passed alongside &! at the end of the command. This allows you to detach from the process without it stopping, so you can for example close the Terminal.

Full example:

budgie-panel --replace &!

Some may opt to use the nohup (no hangup) command to log the output as well. If you do not need to do any long-term logging, it is not necessary to run it with nohup. Below is an example of how you would use it with budgie-panel:

nohup budgie-panel --replace > budgie-panel.out

This will output to the file named budgie-panel.out in whichever directory you run the command. You can change the filename should you desire.

info

Some components may be more sensitive to replacing and may either need to be done in a specific order, or twice (common with budgie-daemon).

When in doubt, you should:

1. Do a double replace of budgie-daemon
2. If you are replacing both budgie-daemon and budgie-panel, first replace then daemon, then replace panel.