How to Install the Budgie Desktop Environment on Linux

Looking to try out something new? Check out Budgie! It’s a fairly new desktop environment based on Gnome 3! It’s a beautiful piece of software created by the Evolve OS project. The main way to get Budgie is by using Evolve OS; however, it’s also possible to install Budgie on several different Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora and OpenSUSE.

How to install Budgie on Ubuntu

Installing Budgie on Ubuntu is fairly easy and there’s even an official personal package archive available for use. Open up a terminal window and enter the command below to add the official PPA to your system.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:evolve-os/ppa

After the PPA is added to your system, you need to update your software sources to reflect this.

sudo apt-get update

Once your system is updated and knows that the new software source is there, you’ll finally be able to install Budgie.

sudo apt-get install budgie-desktop

Note: you can uninstall Budgie by adding sudo apt-get remove budgie-desktop in the terminal.

How to install Budgie on Arch Linux

Installing the Budgie desktop on Arch Linux is easy and straight forward. Using your AUR helper of choice, search for budgie-desktop-git and install it. Alternatively, you can just download the PKGBUILD, compile and then install Budgie.

Note: you can uninstall Budgie by adding sudo pacman -Rsc budgie-desktop in the terminal.

How to install Budgie on Fedora (20)

Want to install Budgie on your Fedora setup? Well, if you’re running Fedora 20 it’s possible! Just enter the command below to start setting up the repo in Yum!

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

Once inside “/etc/yum.repos.d”, you’ll need to wget the repo file onto your system.

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:ikeydoherty:evolve/Fedora_20/home:ikeydoherty:evolve.repo

After getting the repo file in the right place, it’s time to install Budgie.

yum install budgie-desktop

Note: you can uninstall Budgie by adding sudo yum uninstall budgie-desktop in the terminal.

How to install Budgie on OpenSUSE

Want to try out Budgie on OpenSUSE? It’s very easy to get going! Just open a terminal window and enter the command below. It’ll add the Budgie repository to your system.

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:ikeydoherty:evolve/openSUSE_13.2/home:ikeydoherty:evolve.repo

After the repository has been added, it’s time to refresh your package manager.

zypper refresh

Once zypper has been refreshed, Budgie can be installed.

zypper install budgie-desktop

Note: you can uninstall Budgie by adding sudo zypper uninstall budgie-desktop in the terminal.

Conclusion

If you’ve grown tired of the other desktop environments out there, you may want to give the Budgie desktop environment a serious chance. Though it’s based on Gnome’s GTK3, it’s not a fork. The desktop is written completely from scratch, and the design is elegant and well thought out.

This particular desktop environment really isn’t that customizable (when compared to its competition). Still, I don’t really think that hurts all that much, considering it really doesn’t take much to make Budgie look good. The desktop sort of reminds me of Google’s Chrome OS. Simple, elegant, and out of the way.

Are you a fan of the Budgie desktop environment? Tell us what you like about it in the comment section below!

image sources: geekssharingspace.org, github.com