The article details the process to install Budgie desktop in Manjaro Linux. Budgie is a simple and elegant desktop environments from Solus’ team and integrates with Manjaro very well.
Budgie is a popular desktop environment primarily developed by Solus project and integrates tightly with the GNOME stack. It offers a simple and elegance user experience and is available for Majority of the distributions like Arch, Debian, Manjaro etc. Canonical releases a separate Ubuntu Budgie variant altogether.
Features
- Budgie Menu provides its own Budgie Menu with type-as-you-search and category based filtering.
- Raven – Raven provides a central place for almost everything – Calendar, Notifications, Applets, Media integration. When running an application like VLC or Rhythmbox, the controllers are available in Raven for quick control.
- Run dialogue box – You can launch the run dialogue box by pressing Alt + F2 to find and run an application quickly
- Awesome notification centre enabling visual alters and supporting actions and passive modes.
In the next section, we will see how to install Budgie desktop environment in Manjaro Linux and additional components.
Install Budgie desktop environment
Open terminal and use the below command to install Budgie desktop in Manjaro along with Gnome Control center, screensavers and network manager applet.
sudo pacman -S budgie-desktop network-manager-applet gnome-control-center gnome-screensaver
Install additional components
Along with budgie, you can install additional components like gnome terminal, extras and nautilus which is the default file manager for GNOME.
sudo pacman -S gnome-terminal nautilus budgie-extras dconf-editor
Recommended display manager for Budgie desktop environment is lightdm.
sudo pacman -S lightdm lightdm-slick-greeter lightdm-settings systemctl enable lightdm.service --force
Once lightdm installation completes, open /etc/lightdm/lightdom.conf file and uner [seat:*], replace the greeter section to light dm.
greeter-session=lightdm-slick-greeter
Manjaro provides a theming for Budgie. You can install it using below command
sudo pacman -S manjaro-budgie-settings manjaro-settings-manager papirus-maia-icon-theme
Once the Manjaro configurations for budgie are installed, you can dit thie slick-greeter.conf file to match the Manjaro Linux look and feel.
Open file /etc/lightdm/slick-greeter.conf and replace its content by
[Greeter]
background=/usr/share/backgrounds/manjaro-budgie/manjaro-budgie.jpg
theme-name=Matcha-sea
icon-theme-name=Papirus-Maia
draw-grid=false
Wrapping Up
I’ve used Budgie as part of Ubuntu Budgie for some time and it’s indeed a complete experience. Beside its simplicity and elegance, Budgie is not that tough on system resources and can go well with moderate specs. Furthermore, it integrates pretty well with Manjaro Linux.
How do you rate the Budgie desktop? Let us know in the comments.
