The Buddies of Budgie team released Budgie 10.10.4 today as the fourth maintenance update in the Wayland-only Budgie 10.10 desktop environment series, bringing more improvements and some new features.
Coming a month after Budgie 10.10.3, the Budgie 10.10.4 release overhauls panel automatic hiding and dock mode as hidden panels now stay above windows and reappear when you move the mouse to the screen edge, panels set to hide no longer reserve screen space, and a new Super+T shortcut shows the panel in full-screen apps.
Budgie 10.10.4 also updates Raven to let you switch between its widgets and notifications views with the Super+A and Super+N keyboard shortcuts, while the Labwc bridge brings back Super+Shift+arrow keys for moving windows between monitors, keeps Picture-in-Picture windows on top, and prevents opening the root menu when left-clicking the desktop.
On top of that, this release introduces new options for setting the screen dimming delay from 30 seconds to 30 minutes (or turning it off completely), as well as the option to choose between the gtklock and swaylock screen lockers. For now, both options can be set with gsettings.
Among other noteworthy changes, Budgie 10.10.4 makes panel startup faster as the list of installed apps is now loaded once and shared across the panel, improves the Bluetooth applet to open Bluejay, Blueman, or Budgie Control Center from its settings button, and improves Crystal Dock to handle JPEG XL wallpapers on more distros.
Budgie 10.10.4 also fixes various issues with applets disappearing from the panel after updating to Budgie 10.10.3 when using a language other than English, panel staying hidden when one of its applets fails to load, panel moving off the primary monitor after changing its edge, and a startup crash when a panel has no stored position.
Last but not least, Budgie Menu no longer covers panels that don’t reserve screen space, clicking a dropdown inside a popover no longer closes it, the mouse pointer is visible again in VMware virtual machines, and older Qt applications and AppImages without Wayland support can launch again by falling back to XWayland.
Check out the release announcement page for more details. Budgie 10.10.4 will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions, so make sure that you update your Budgie Desktop installation as soon as possible to enjoy the new features and improvements.