A recent thread here offered a brief discussion on Pop!_OS. I gave it a brief look on a VM (UTM on a Mac and Parallels Desktop for Mac) finding it fairly attractive, but not compelling enough to lure me away from Ubuntu MATE.
Now, there is an article on ZDnet comparing Pop!_OS to Ubuntu Budgie, with the author claiming both have aesthetics that appeal to him. So, on a whim (is there any other reason?) I decided to take a look at Ubuntu Budgie.
On Distrowatch's rankings page, Pop!_OS is listed at #6. Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Budgie don't appear at all. Go figure. Still, the Ubuntu Budgie site offers both LTS and 25.10 versions, so it's currently under support.
My problem is that only X86_64 is supported. I have an M1 Mac. I'm going to give it a try under a VM and see if I can get it to work, but I'm afraid that even if I do, I'm losing out on the total experience.
Has anyone tried Budgie? What are your impressions?
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Hi, @OldStrummer 
You wrote:
It may not be your case, but I know that some people think that the DistroWatch list / ranking is some kind of metric of Linux distributions downloads and/or their respective usage. It is NOT. Here’s the explanation about the DistroWatch “ranking”:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
" (...) The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring interest in Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more. (...)"
I hope this is informative
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Thanks, Ricardo. I actually do know that, and I'm sorry if I made it sound like a popularity contest. I mentioned it mainly because Pop!_OS has been receiving a lot of attention here (and elsewhere) and neither Budgie nor MATE have show much interest on Distrowatch.
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I'm planning on testing out Pop!_OS soon, too. I'm interested in COSMIC now that it has a full release. System76 peeps seem to know what they're doing - at least based on what I've heard from them when interviewed (on Linux Unplugged). But it'll take a lot to pull me away from MATE!
Ubuntu Budgie is being added to the list!
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Well, my Budgie (not to be confused with the hard-rock Welsh band of the early 1970s) experiment was short-lived. Parallels refused to go beyond reading the ISO image, complaining of an architecture mismatch. UTM (which in an interesting piece of software) offers architecture emulation, so Budgie installed under the x86_64 emulation, but that's about as far as it got. No login screen, no icons, no menus, just the fancy desktop image.
Dumped.
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I’ve made a test run of about 12 other different flavors (of Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Debian, etc.)
Played around and I’m still here.
Tried through their upgrades and I’m still here.
Always something was not right some way, and I’m still here.
Won’t make a long note with feeling, impressions, dissection or comparative analysis, since I’m still here.
What can I say
W
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