No, Budgie 11 is not going to require a fresh install. Yes, Budgie and its related components will be rewritten and while yes, the intent is to have applications like the Software Center written in EFL as well, it should be noted that by that time, we'll already have our own theming across GTK and EFL. While applications won't necessarily look identical side-by-side when comparing an EFL-based application and one written in GTK, the obvious goal is to get them as close to it as possible.
Before this move, many of the default applications will be changed on the ISOs (not on your systems), whether to those written by members of our community, ourselves, or third-party developers. This move will be to reduce the disruption from libraries like libadwaita and once we are closer to the release of Budgie 11 (no ETA) then I imagine there will be further default changes as well.
Folks aren't concerned about this because we have a history of rolling out changes, under-the-hood or otherwise, rather seamlessly.
Knowing that much of what keeps this system stable is about to be yanked from its core and rebuilt is just so scary to me.
Not really sure why. Are you concerned about the likes of pipewire + wireplumber eventually replacing pulseaudio? Wayland compositors replacing xorg-server? Rewrites of our tooling, package manager, etc.?
Things being stagnant is not necessarily what keeps it stable. GTK is not part of Solus' core. GTK-based applications aren't even part of Solus' core. All of our tooling, optimizations, curated rolling release model, and so forth is Solus' core. It just happens that Budgie, Software Center, and our Hardware Driver utility are written in GTK. If this was a move from say Qt to EFL, or GTK to Qt, then it'd be the same story.
I just don't see how something like a new DE / toolkit etc etc is NOT going to require a fresh installation
That isn't how that rollouts like this work though. A new DE is rolled out in the form of a budgie-desktop update. Any runtime dependencies like a new Control Center, or for example our existing budgie-desktop-view package, are added as rundeps and get automatically pulled in on updates. Nothing about that requires changes on the user's side, and we have tooling like usysconf, plus any supplemental tooling we develop for the move from 10 to 11, that can automatically trigger during that specific package transaction. None of that is difficult and none of it requires a reinstall.
so many things than can go wrong
Which isn't a concern the end user needs to have. Folks didn't get concerned when we were moving from Budgie 8 to 10, that went fine for them. I don't expect it to be any different from 10 to 11.
