Budgie DE moving away from GTK

With the upcoming Budgie DE 10.10, Budgie is moving away from GTK and towards QT.

Thanks for the heads-up. Another DE to avoid then since it is locking in to Wintel Wayland. I think the part of the statement that said it had taken them 2 years of work to get where they are now says it all. Also the fact that they deemed getting Wayland to work at the expense of XKB-OPTIONS is rather telling.

You realize that in some point you have to decide moving to Wayland as more and more are moving away from Xorg as time time goes by. Well maybe a handful of obscure distros/DEs will continue with xorg :wink:

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Well I may be forced to use Artix Community Edition (xfce) that uses XLibre. :wink:

For now I am good until June 2028 on PCLOS Debian ("bookworm" edition).

Or I could move to AlmaLinux:

Extract from above:

" Users who still require X11 can opt for long-term support distributions like AlmaLinux 9, for example, which includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until 2032."

Or better still go back to Devuan:

" Devuan is not dropping X11 ; it continues to support it as a core component of its distribution.

Devuan 6 'Excalibur', released in November 2025, retains X11 as the default display server and uses the minimal Slim display manager with Xfce 4.20 on X11 by default. This reflects Devuan’s long-standing commitment to providing a Debian-based system without systemd, while preserving traditional Unix-like behavior, including full X11 support.

Although major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu are shifting toward Wayland-only defaults, Devuan has maintained X11 as a primary option. The project has even actively supported alternatives like Xlibre , a fork of X.org aimed at revitalizing X11 development amid concerns over Wayland's limitations and the perceived corporate influence on upstream projects.

While Devuan does offer Wayland support (e.g., via libseat1 and seatd ), it remains X11-first and does not plan to drop it. The distribution continues to provide X11 packages and security updates, though some users note that critical X.org security patches may not be applied as quickly due to the project’s forked nature.

In short, Devuan remains a strong choice for users who rely on X11 and want to avoid the forced transition to Wayland.

AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts."

I looked a bit into XFCE's plans, and even though they are working on a Wayland version now, they indicate that they will maintain an X 11 version also, long-term.

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I'm a little dissapointed that they didn't continue with what they had toyed with changing to before, being EFL. I've got my qualms with both QT and GTK, so it would've been nice to see a third getting used a bit more to kind of combat both of them, no matter how small.

There must have been problems and QT made more sense, it just would've been nice to see in my eyes.

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GTK has been drastically de-tooled in GTK4 with all that tooling moved to LibAdwaita.
GTK cannot be called a toolkit any longer, it is a package that partially provides base tooling with a dependency on LibAdwaita to supply the rest.

Due to this, dropping GTK becomes the logical choice.

I also have qualms with QT. It's dual-licensing can be tricky to navigate.
It is bulky, less transparent and Corporate.
I have long endorsed it as a necessary alternative to GTK, but without illusions about its flaws.

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