New Spins preparing for Fedora 38 complete the family of Fedora editions
a few days ago the FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee that handles the technical side of developing the Fedora Linux distribution), made it known the news that approved the creation of images Official ISOs with Budgie and Sway graphical shells.
It is mentioned that Budgie SIG and Sway SIG are founded to maintain packages and builds with Budgie and Sway. On the Budgie SIG side, it is founded to maintain packages with Budgie and form a new build after the release of Fedora Linux 38.
The Budgie environment initially focused on its use in the Solus distribution, but it has since evolved into a distro-independent project that has also started distributing packages for Arch Linux and Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu Budgie edition was made official in 2016, but the use of Budgie in Fedora has been largely neglected, and official packages for Fedora have only been shipped since Fedora 37.
It is worth mentioning that Budgie is based on GNOME technologies and its own implementation of GNOME Shell (in the upcoming Budgie 11 release), as well as plans to separate the desktop functionality from the layer that provides display and output, which will allow abstraction of specific graphics toolkits and libraries, and implement full support for the Wayland protocol).
To manage windows, Budgie uses Budgie Window Manager (BWM), which is an extended modification of the basic Mutter plugin. Budgie is based on a panel that is similar in organization to classic desktop panels. All panel items are applets, which allows you to flexibly customize the composition, change the layout, and replace implementations of the elements of the main panel to your liking. Available applets include the classic applications menu, task switcher, open windows list area, virtual desktop view, power management indicator, volume control applet, system status indicator, and the watch.
On the part of Sway is built on the Wayland protocol and is fully compatible with i3 and i3ba manager.
Sway is developed as a modular project built on top of the wlroots library, which contains all the basic primitives for organizing the work of the composite manager. To set up a complete user environment, related components are offered: swayidle (background process with KDE's idle protocol implementation), swaylock (screen saver), mako (notification manager), grim (creation of screenshots ), slurp (selection of an area on the screen), wf-recorder (video capture), waybar (application bar), virtboard (on-screen keyboard), wl-clipboard (clipboard management), wallutils (wallpaper management). desk).
On the other hand, it is also worth noting that the FESCo also already approved the proposal to start forming on Fedora Linux mobile builds with the Phosh shell.
For those who don't know shell phosh, they should know that this se based on GNOME technologies and the GTK library, it uses the Phoc composite server running on top of Wayland, as well as its own squeekboard on-screen keyboard.
The environment was originally developed by Purism as a GNOME Shell analogue for Librem 5, but later became part of the GNOME Unofficial Projects and is now also used in postmarketOS, Mobian, and some firmware for Pine64 devices.
The builds will ship with Fedora Linux 38 and will be built for the x86_64 and aarch64 architectures by the Fedora Mobility team, which until now has been limited to maintaining the 'phosh-desktop' package set.
Finally, for those interested in the packages to install these environments, they should know that they are already available in the current stable version of Fedora, but starting with Fedora Linux 38, it will be possible to use pre-made ISO images.
Fedora Budgie Spin and Fedora Sway Spin will complete the collection of Fedora Spins builds, which currently features alternative desktop environments such as KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce, LXQt, MATE, LXDE, i3, and SOAS (Sugar on a Stick).