In my ongoing mission to ensure that I am keeping up on as many wiki pages for openSUSE as I can, I noticed that the information I put in for the terminal installation process for the Budgie Desktop was not right, I didn’t look through the history but I’m sure it was absolutely my fault. Regardless, I decided to test it out in a VM and see that it installs properly and I could play around in it without crashing. Sure enough, it seems to be working well and after switching things up to a dark them, I thought it looked pretty darn good.
A simple command in the terminal makes the magic happen:
sudo zypper install budgie-desktop
After Zypper does its thing, logging out and logging back in will give you a pretty darn decent implementation of the Budgie-Desktop. There isn’t any openSUSE customization with it, as far as I can tell, it runs well and feels clean.
Oddly, instead of a Budgie Logo for the menu it is a GNOME logo. I am not sure if that is the upstream default or not but it just seems odd to me.
Though, I don’t much care for the light theme, that is easily fixed in the Budgie Settings. I went for Breeze-Dark with everything, just because I think that is the best thing going as of today. I must say that the settings are nice, neat and simple which I think works well for this desktop.
I noticed that when I switched the icon theme to Breeze Dark the Plasma logo appeared on the menu icon. I guess if you have Gnome with the Adwaita theme it is only reasonable that you would have the Plasma logo with the Breeze theme. It still seems a bit odd to me.
I hung out here and played around, browsed the web, and tested out a few of the tools. I don’t feel like Budgie is quite right for my “home”. It’s a nice home, very well put together, from what little I experienced hanging out, it is just not one I feel compelled to move into.
Final Thoughts
The ease of installing other Desktop Environments (DEs) in openSUSE is super simple and I truly appreciate it. It is also nice to see that playing with other DEs doesn’t seem to mess things up at all. They all seem to cohabitate quite nicely on a single installation.
I am quite sure this is the vanilla configuration of Budgie that is just how openSUSE does Desktop Environments. I do, however think the Budgie Logo or the openSUSE logo would be preferred on the menu but that would be the only real change I would make.
Budgie is a nice, crisp Desktop Environment but it just isn’t for me. I think KDE Plasma has spoiled me. I also need to do a better job of keeping on top of the different wikis hosted by openSUSE. It is very easy to neglect them. Thankfully, I can play with it all in VMs for testing while I work on other tasks.
Dang openSUSE Linux is awesome!