How To Install The Budgie Desktop on Ubuntu

The Budgie Desktop is one of the latest and modern Gnome-based desktop that gives a minimal and elegant desktop experience and is available for all major Linux distributions. It is designed in such a way that it utilizes fewer system resources.

Budgie desktop has a straight forward app launcher that is known as Budgie menu that contains a lot of apps for you to work on and be productive. It offers an easy and quick way to search and launch apps with features like category based filtering and type-as-you-search options.Budgie also includes a sidebar that can be accessed by clicking on the rightmost icons in the panel where you can view a calendar, notifications, and settings to control elements on the desktop.

You can experience many other features after installing and using the Budgie desktop. In today’s article, we will see how to install Budgie desktop in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Let’s get started with the installation. As Budgie is a part of Ubuntu official repositories so there is no need to add any PPAs for installing it on the Ubuntu OS.  We will simply need to run the installation command.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to launch the Terminal. Then enter the following command in Terminal to check for any updates.

$ sudo apt update

Then run the following command in Terminal to install the Budgie desktop:

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-budgie-desktop

After installation, a prompt will appear that will ask you to choose the display manager. Choose lightdm and press Enter.

It will take a few more seconds to complete the process.

After the process is finished, run the following command in Terminal to reboot the system.

$ sudo reboot

After reboot, you will see the following login screen. Click on the icon at the bottom of the desktop as shown in the below image.

From there, select the budgie-desktop option.

Here is the default view of the Budgie desktop.

You can access the Budgie menu by clicking on the at the leftmost corner of the desktop.

If you do not like the Budgie desktop and want to switch back to the regular Ubuntu desktop, you will need to uninstall it by running the following commands in Terminal:

$ sudo apt remove ubuntu-budgie-desktop ubuntu-budgie* lightdm
$ sudo apt autoremove
$ sudo apt install --reinstall gdm3

That’s all for it. You can see that how simple and easy it is to install the Budgie desktop in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.