Hey all!
This post is to inform everyone about the upcoming changes to the branding packages for Budgie, MATE, and GNOME. If you are not familiar with these packages, they set the default settings for each desktop. As of the time of writing, the branding packages for the aforementioned desktops are split into a few sub-packages, depending on the release of Solus when they were introduced (e.g. budgie-desktop-branding-fortitude and budgie-desktop-branding-fortitude-plus). This was done so that changed defaults in new releases of Solus don’t overwrite the defaults of older installations.
This has a couple of downsides, however. First, it makes it much more confusing for the desktop package maintainers to know where a particular setting was set in case it needs to be changed. Second, people who installed an older release of Solus would need to install a newer branding package themselves when one is made; they don’t get installed automatically. This leads to the situation where old installations of Solus that are otherwise working perfectly might be using broken and unmaintained themes by default, for example. Not good.
The Plasma edition of Solus doesn’t separate branding packages by release. Going forward, neither will our other editions. This will make the branding much easier to maintain for us, and you can be sure that you always have the latest defaults without having to worry about which branding packages you have installed. That does mean that the defaults on your system will change when there is a branding package update. This shouldn’t happen often, but sometimes it might be necessary as time moves on and upstream settings change or break, or themes become unmaintained.
Note that changes in the branding package will only affect you if you are still using the default settings. If you’ve changed a setting, your changes will not be overwritten.
