brent Having used Budgie on Solus for so long, am I going to like it or appreciate its implementation on another distro. are their subtle differences? or major? Or too similar?
With the exception of Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS (which I probably used 300-500 hours over the course of several months), I don't have extensive experience with other Budgie distros. I've looked at most all of the others in VM's, but used them only for a few hours each, just poking around.
Each of the implementations are subtly different from what I can tell, and most are usable although the quality varies, in part because fitting Budgie onto different OS layers can be a challenge and the workarounds are sometimes not ideal, and in part because the maintaining teams have different levels of skill and dedication.
I can recommend Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS without reservation, because the Budgie implementation is flawless, the maintenance team is solid and responsive, and UB team's lead is tightly aligned with BuddiesOfBudgie, contributing frequently. The UB team has tweaked Budgie (menus are slightly different, different apps are used here and there, the distro has a "Welcome Center" that enhances theming and layout setup and maintenance, and so on), but in general a Solus Budgie user would easily adapt. UB is built on a Ubuntu base, and that has advantages and disadvantages, of course.
I took a quick "Live" look at UB 22.10 SR the other day, and saw further tweaks, but I haven't used it enough to claim to know much about it.
I have not been following BuddiesOfBudgie so I don't know what the future holds for the DE. As I recall, Josh was thinking some months ago about moving Budgie entirely off the Gnome stack, and I think that might be a good idea in the long run.
