Joshua Strobl, primary developer for the Budgie desktop, recently shared his usual “State of the Budgie” that included goals for 2025. The meat of the piece was all about what happened with Budgie in 2024 (which is interesting on its own), but if you scroll down far enough, you'll get a glimpse into what's planned for 2025.

The first bit of news is the release of version 10.10, which is expected in Q1 (between January and March). The biggest announcement, however, is that, with the release of version 10.10, Budgie will be a Wayland-only desktop. Strobl mentions that in git, Budgie has been Wayland-only since July 2024, so I guess this means standard releases will no longer support X11. This is big news because X11 should be considered no longer a viable option (what with security and performance issues).

At the same time, Budgie 10.0 will be set to maintenance mode to keep it working until Budgie 11 is released.

Strobl also mentions some of the applets have to be updated to reach some degree (or complete) feature parity under the "legacy" X11 environments. Those applets include Keyboard Layout, Night Light, Task List, and Workspaces.

Once version 10.10 has been completed, the team will shift their focus to Budgie 11. On that, Strobl had this to say, "After the dust has settled with Budgie 10.10, we will shift our focus towards Budgie 11. While we have already been working on some aspects of the experience that will already apply to Budgie 11, we have not yet started on "budgie-desktop" itself such as: porting some daemon v1 functionality to v2, windowing logic, panel, Raven, etc."