Budgie 10.10 Desktop Environment Released as the First Wayland-Only Version

posted by Marius Nestor on Jan 10, 2026,
updated Jan 14, 2026

Work on Budgie 10.10 kicked off more than a year ago, and many of Budgie’s components have already been ported to Wayland. Budgie 10.10 is the first release that marks the official migration from X11 to Wayland.

Budgie 10.10 uses a wide range of Wayland protocols, including ext-workspace-v1, wlr-foreign-toplevel-management-unstable-v1, wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1, wlr-output-management-unstable-v1, and xdg-output-unstable-v1.

Read on

Linuxiac:

• Budgie 10.10 Released as the Desktop’s First Wayland-Based Version

  Budgie Desktop 10.10 has been released, delivering its first full migration from X11 to Wayland and marking the end of a development spanning more than a decade (the initial 10’s release came out in December 2015). With that said, with the new 10.10 release, Budgie 10 series now enters maintenance mode as the project shifts its primary focus toward the upcoming Budgie 11.

  Despite the underlying architectural change, the user experience under Wayland remains intentionally familiar. Panels, applets, Raven, desktop icons provided by Budgie Desktop View, and established keyboard shortcuts all behave much as they did under X11.

UbuntuHandbook:

• Budgie Desktop switched to Wayland by Releasing v10.10 | UbuntuHandbook

  Budgie, the independent free open-source desktop environment, released new 10.10 version today.

  This is the final feature release in the 10.x series, as the dev team has formally put it into maintenance mode, and focus on the development of the next Budgie 11.

  Budgie 10.10 switched to Wayland session by default for better security and improved performance. And, it promoted that “the experience of using Budgie Desktop under Wayland remains the same as it was under X11”.

XDA:

• Another Linux desktop environment goes Wayland-only as it prepares to change version after a decade

  As Linux distros and desktop environments continue to march on, we're seeing developers take different stances on how they handle the X11 vs. Wayland problem. Some developers are keeping an X11 and a Wayland version of their software around to cater to both parties. Some are planning to get rid of X11 entirely, and others are going back to X11 with a potentially new and improved version of it.

  Well, it seems another team has decided to hang up X11 for good and focus on Wayland. The team behind the Budgie desktop environment is forcing Wayland-only for version 10.10, in preparation for the release of Budgie 11, the first major version upgrade in a decade.

Linuxiac:

• Big Changes Ahead for the Budgie Desktop in 2026

  Big changes are coming to the Budgie desktop in 2026 as the project transitions from the decade-old Budgie 10 series to a new, modular architecture under Budgie 11.

  With yesterday’s release of Budgie 10.10, the tenth feature series, the Budgie project is concluding active feature development on the 10.x line and moving it into maintenance mode. This final release of Budgie 10 also ships a Wayland-only experience to serve users while the team focuses on the next generation of the desktop.

  The centerpiece of the upcoming change is Budgie 11, which the project has confirmed will be developed using Qt6 and Kirigami, a UI framework developed by KDE for building adaptive, responsive applications. Unlike previous toolkit experiments, including past work with Qt5, GTK3, GTK4 plans, and EFL, the Budgie team confirmed that it now has functional Qt6 code in production as part of Budgie Desktop Services.

GoL:

• Budgie 10.10 finally makes the Wayland jump as development moves to Budgie 11 | GamingOnLinux

  Budgie may not be one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux but it is an interesting one, and with Budgie 10.10 it finally migrated to Wayland.