To preface: I said when I made the announcement that there wasn’t any drama, and there still isn’t. I remain on good terms with everyone working on Budgie, I’m still in the Matrix channels, and I still maintain the Budgie packages for Arch. I’m just not actively helping develop the desktop anymore, and I’d like to explain why.

Budgie goes independent

When I started working on Budgie, I’d been a Solus user and packager for some time and the pandemic had just started. I was bored and needed something to do, so I asked if the team had any projects that I could contribute to. The one that I spent the most time on, and which kickstarted my future contributions to Budgie, was a new system tray based on XEmbed. I hadn’t ever programmed anything substantial in C or in Vala before, but it ended up teaching me both languages and I felt rewarded knowing that I’d meaningfully improved the Budgie experience for users.

When Solus and Budgie split at the beginning of 2021, I went with Budgie and became one of the five main developers, later four, with Josh Strobl leading the team. We formed an organization and set our sights on taking Budgie out of the freeze it had been in for some time so we could make some big changes and bring those changes to more distributions. Later that year, I became an Arch Linux “Trusted User” (now Package Maintainer), so I naturally became the Budgie packager for Arch. I was still in university at the time, so contributing was easy and I found plenty of time to do it - a new built-in theme, a second system tray rewrite into StatusNotifier, a plugin system for Raven, et cetera.

Programming becomes a job

Some people can do something for eight hours a day five days a week, come home every day, and do even more of it. I thought I could be one of those people. Once I graduated university at the end of 2022 and got into the workforce, I was suddenly working on code full-time, far more time than I’d ever spent writing code for anything - even personal projects. It wasn’t a problem yet - I was still able to maintain energy and enthusiasm for both my day job and for Budgie - but that wouldn’t last forever. My output slipped pretty quickly, with GitHub contributions dropping to nothing for most days after I was hired, but I still found time to submit pull requests when I felt able.

Wayland

In mid-2023, I started working on a Wayland compositor of my own to get to grips with how the protocol worked. I even wrote a blog post about it that made the rounds on Reddit and Hackernews. We had decided that Budgie was going to support Wayland, and I’d originally intended for Flyaway to just be a sandbox to get to know Wayland, but we eventually decided to just use it as a base for Magpie v1 - the Budgie Wayland compositor. This was the biggest project I’d ever worked on for Budgie, and thinking back, I bit off more than I could chew… but I kept working on it regardless, adding more features that weren’t present in Flyaway. I even created Waycheck, a GUI for Wayland protocol detection that is by far the most successful personal project I’ve ever made.

The breaking point

By 2024, I began to lose momentum. Working on Budgie, something I’d once been very passionate about, had become more of a chore than anything else. Maybe it was because I’d been working on it for so long, maybe it was the sheer scale of the work required to make a Wayland compositor, I don’t know. Regardless, I felt stuck: the others were relying on me to make a compositor that they could build around for other components, and I was the most experienced in Wayland when it came to the core team, but I couldn’t find the energy to work on much at all. Software was work now. Every weekend standup we had, I’d just say I hadn’t made any progress or give some excuse. I didn’t want to let the team down, but I didn’t want to force myself to work on something I didn’t have any passion for anymore.

I tried for a while to push myself to keep going, but something had to give. At the start of 2025, a year after I’d joined the workforce and a good while since any real progress had been made on Magpie v1, I gave up. I’d installed KDE Plasma on the laptop I’m using to write this blog post months prior, and I decided I was done. I let the team know I was taking a hiatus from Budgie development, made an announcement on Mastodon, and haven’t committed code to Budgie since.

What now?

Before leaving Budgie, I felt the itch to program something new, so I started working on Magothy (a CPU and system info printing tool) as a way to learn Rust. I eventually turned it into my first and only Rust crate: libcpuname. Occasional commits to the latter, and updates to Waycheck’s protocol list when new protocols come out, have been my only real programming projects since I left Budgie. I realized recently that I’m not the kind of person who can do the same thing as a hobby and as a career. I don’t intend to completely stop working on open-source software, but as of now, I just don’t enjoy making it like I used to. Maybe that’ll change eventually.

On the bright side, in parallel to losing my enthusiasm for programming, I’ve regained enthusiasm for another hobby that I had when I was young: photography. Having a creative outlet that’s not just another form of typing things into a text editor is something I think I’ve needed for a while. I’ve been able to share that with my partner, my family, and my friends who I learned photography and cinematography alongside. Who knows if it’ll last, but right now it feels good, and I hope I can keep it up.

The End

Even though I’m not an active Budgie user anymore, just a packager for Arch, I still love and respect the Buddies - Josh, Evan, and David. They were all incredibly understanding of my decision to leave the project, likely more understanding than I deserved, and I’ve been happy to see them continue to make progress on the rightful removal of X11 from the codebase. The discourse in Linux desktop circles always seems to be wars between GNOME and Plasma, but everyone forgets that choice is the superpower of Linux. You can go with one of the two, or you can go with Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce, Budgie, Sway, LXQt, whatever works best for you.

I’m glad that Budgie exists, and I’m proud of what I helped accomplish during my time working on it. May it live forever.