Now that Budgie 10.10 is out as the last chapter in the Budgie 10 series, the devs behind this modern Linux desktop environment have kicked off the development of the next major release, Budgie 11.

Budgie developer Joshua Strobl shares with us today some interesting details about Budgie 11, such as the fact that the upcoming desktop environment will be written in the Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks open-source application frameworks, and some steps have already been taken in this direction with the Budgie 10.10 release.

The devs already wrote Budgie Desktop Services, the beating heart of Budgie 11, in Qt 6, and they plan on writing the Budgie Display Configurator in Qt6/Kirigami as well. The end goal here is to make Budgie more modular, allowing users and integrators alike the freedom to fully configure the desktop environment.

By porting Budgie 11 to Qt 6, the Budgie devs aim to make it easier for other developers to bootstrap new desktops and ecosystems, or even port their existing projects to Qt and Wayland. As you can expect, Budgie 11 will be Wayland-only, as the migration from X11 was completed with the Budgie 10.10 release.

Development of Budgie 11 kicked off earlier this month with a focus on defining how to version Budgie 11 and ABI stability, general repository structure, early definitions and design of desired architecture, and defining Budgie 11’s capabilities while avoiding the mistakes made in Budgie 10.

Some early designs of Budgie 11 reveal that the devs are interested in providing an open architecture for the desktop environment, allowing it to be adaptable to a wide range of devices, such as TVs, phones, tablets, and even VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality).

You can find technical details about what the Budgie devs plan for Budgie 11 in this blog post. We have no idea when Budgie 11 will be released, yet, but we can only hope that 2026 will bring us at least a first taste.

Last updated on January 11th, 2026 at 10:14 am