v10.5 Official announcement can be found here:
https://getsol.us/2019/03/17/solus-4-released/

Text of the announcement reproduced below:
Applets
Budgie Menu

This Budgie release introduces a few refinements to Budgie Menu. We no longer show applications multiple times in non-compact mode when headers are turned off. We will also attempt to eliminate the “Sundry” category by automatically moving them to an “Other” category if the category is available.

Caffeine Mode

Budgie 10.5 introduces a new applet called Caffeine Mode. Caffeine Mode is designed to ensure your system does not automatically suspend, lock, or dim when you’re hard at work.

Caffeine Mode supports:

    Notifications when it is turned on or off
    Setting a timer to automatically turn off Caffeine Mode
    Turning up your display brightness to max or a designated brightness level

We’d like to thank yursan9 for their amazing work on this applet!
Icon Tasklist

Budgie 10.5 provides a massive upgrade to the IconTasklist applet. Our new IconTasklist applet has improved application detection to more consistently group applications and introduces a brand new IconTasklist popover experience.

This new popover design enables you to:

    Close all instances of the selected application
    Easily access per-window controls for marking it always on top, maximizing / unmaximizing, minimizing, and moving it to various workspaces.
    Quickly favorite / unfavorite apps
    Quickly launch a new instance of the selected application
    Scroll up or down on an IconTasklist button when a single window is open to activate and bring it into focus, or minimize it, based on the scroll direction.
    Toggle to minimize and unminimize various application windows

Additionally, this new popover design enables you to take advantage of custom application actions by supported apps, such as launching a private window in Firefox, composing a new message in Geary, and more!
Raven

Raven, our widget and notification center, has seen improvements in Budgie 10.5.
Calendar

You can now enable week numbers for the Calendar widget in Raven. This can be done easily by going to the Raven section of Budgie Desktop Settings and toggling on “Enable display of week numbers in Calendar”.
Notifications

Budgie 10.5 introduces improved notification management. With this release, notification management is no longer a “clear all or nothing” scenario. Notifications are grouped on a per-app basis and you’re in control of whether or not you want to:

    Clear all notifications
    Clear all notifications for a specific app
    Clear a specific notification for an app

Building on this, notification summaries and descriptions are now properly summarized in their Notification popups. We will also no longer store notifications for:

    Power, such as automatic suspend and wake-from-suspend notifications
    Printer notifications, such as those for network printers

Sound

Our Sound widgets have been completely rewritten and redesigned! We’ve broken up the widgets into Sound Output and Sound Input, fixed some long-standing bugs, and introduced long sought after features.

For Sound Output, you can now enable the “Allow raising volume above 100%” option to crank up your volume to 150%! Great for parties or movie watching.

Controlling your volume on a per-application basis has never been easier. With our new Sound Output widget, you can now control each application as well as mute them right from Raven! No longer do you need need to dive into the Sound settings in GNOME Control Center or install a third-party tool like pavucontrol. Applications which utilize ALSA for sound playback will also have less verbose names, so you can expect to see applications like mocp (music-on-console player) showing up as “mocp” rather than “ALSA plug-in [mocp]”

With both the Sound Output and Input widgets, you can easily switch between devices, and the functionality for device switching has been rewritten to be more reliable in cases of plugging in a new device or removing an existing one.

Last but not least, in the event you have no output or input devices, we’ll automatically hide the respective widget in Raven! Plug in a device and they’ll automatically show up!
Personalization

We strongly believe that Budgie should provide a balanced, curated desktop experience for our users, enabling a reasonable level of personalization out-of-the-box and empower our users (and downstreams such as Ubuntu Budgie) to open up a world of possibilities with Budgie applets.

Budgie 10.5 introduces a wider array of personalization options via our Budgie Desktop Settings application. Let’s go over the various sections which have been refinements!
Style

Budgie 10.5 builds on our existing support for selecting various cursor, icon, and widget (GTK) themes by ensuring that the options we present to users for icons and widgets are more likely to work well with Budgie.

To do this, we have implemented a blacklist of Icon and GTK themes which are known to not provide our users the most optimal experience. For GTK Themes, we blacklist themes such as Adwaita, Clearlooks, Industrial, etc. which are provided by GNOME and are largely aimed at supporting GNOME Shell. For Icon Themes, we blacklist Breeze and the Solus SC Icon Theme (largely leverages Papirus). Should you desire, you can still switch to these themes through a third-party tool such as GNOME Tweaks.

Thanks to the hard work of EbonJaeger, you can choose the position in which Notification pop-ups are displayed. By default, Notifications will display in the top right of your screen, however that can now be changed to any corner of your screen!

For vendors, we now provide the gschema key to hide the “Built-in theme” option. For Solus 4, we leverage this option to hide such built-in “internal” theme and prioritize our work on surfacing third-party GTK themes such as Plata.
Raven

Budgie 10.5 introduces a new section to Budgie Desktop Settings for personalizing Raven. This is where you would go to allow raising volume above 100% as well as toggle various widgets. We provide options for:

    Allowing the raising the volume above 100%
    Enabling the display of week numbers in the Calendar widget
    Toggling Raven widgets
        Calendar
        Sound Output
        Microphone / Sound Input
        Media Playback Controls (MPRIS)
        Power Strip (Quick Access to Budgie Desktop Settings, Lock, and Logout)

Windows

The Windows section of Budgie Desktop Settings introduces options for:

    Center new windows on screen (when possible).
    Disabling Night Light mode when a window becomes full-screen. This option will automatically re-enable Night Light mode when leaving fullscreen. This is great for late night gaming or movie watching.
    Enabling window focus change on mouse enter and leave instead of based on clicking on a window.

Other

Some other changes / fixes of note:

    Added dedicated CSS classes for Sound widgets (apps-list, devices-list, sound-devices) as well as various popovers to make it easier for theme developers.
    We now prevent the dragging of desktop icons into the IconTasklist, given its purpose is to show favorited and/or active windows.

Copyright © 2015-2019 Solus Project.

v10.4: Official announcement can be found here:
https://solus-project.com/2017/08/15/solus-3-released/

Text of the announcement reproduced below:
Budgie 10.4 now has maximize and unmaximize animations for applications.

In this release of Budgie, the alt+tab switcher will now prefer the theme
icon instead of the X11 icon where possible. Shift+Alt+Tab support has
also been implemented, enabling you to go backwards in the Alt+Tab dialog.

This release introduces a new applet, Night Light, which can help reduce
eye strain by reducing your display’s blue light by making your screen
“warmer”. This applet integrates into the Night Light functionality
provided in Mutter 3.24.x and provides quick access to toggling Night
Light on/off, as well as:

-Changing the schedule between “Sunset to Sunrise” and “Manual” (which is
configured in GNOME Control Center)
-Temperature of the display when enabled
-One-click access to launch your Display settings

The Places Indicator applet also received some love this release, with a
new option to always expand the places section when the applet is shown.
The whole Places section header is now a clickable button, making
toggling the section easier. The Places Applet icon has also been
changed to a more apt folder icon, better representing “places” rather
than “disks” as previously presented.


The Calendar widget in Raven will now remove the date selection if you
change the month or year.
The Icon Tasklist applet no longer has a list of “derper” applications
for which we’d override the icon. If a .desktop file is found, use the
icon referenced in it.
The User Indicator now has updated and refined iconography thanks to Sam Hewitt.

Budgie Menu

Building upon the lessons learned when (and inspiration from) implementing
the Brisk Menu for MATE, searching has been completely overhauled. We now
support the use of categories for searching and provide a predictable, sane
search mechanism. Items that previously would not show up as expected, such
as searching for “Displays”, are now resolved.

For items that would show up in excess, we now de-duplicate search results
to only showing unique entries when we’re in “search mode” or “super compact”
mode (in other words, no headers or sidebar categories).

We now dynamically compute scores for a given entry during search in relation
to the search term. Assuming the entry is relevant, we’ll display results
in a given order and allow terms to match and display higher up in the list
depending on how close it is to the term, the contents, how much a string
is matched, etc.

Panels

Vertical Panels

In Budgie 10.4, you can now set vertical panels on the left and right sides
of your display. Popovers will correctly indicate (with its “tail”) the
point of origin, we’ve done extensive work to ensure all of our animations
and applets will display and adjust depending on if they are on
(or originating from) a horizontal or vertical panel, and Raven will account
for right-side panels and slide out from underneath the panel, as well as
anchor to left panels when no horizontal or right panel exists.

Transparency

With these new panels, you will now also be able to control the panel
transparency (via our new Settings app) with three modes:

-None: The panel is always opaque.
-Dynamic: The panel is opaque when there is a maximized window on the workspace, or Raven is open, otherwise it’s transparent.
-Always: The panel is always transparent.

Docks

As if Budgie panels couldn’t improve more, we’ve also introduced a Dock
mode for panels, enabling you to put a dock on any side of your display!

This Dock mode also uses a custom CSS class, which means theme developers
have the ability to implement custom styling.

Popovers

For Budgie 10.4, we implemented the Budgie.Popover widget, enabling us to
replace our usage of Gtk.Popover and fix a long-standing issue with
inconsistent popover animations, for example Budgie Menu animating across
the screen if the user’s panel (and the menu applet) was at the bottom.

Furthermore, this Popover widget enables more granular positioning
regardless of its origin (top, bottom, left, or right). This granular
positioning helped to provide us the opportunity to implement panels for
all sides of your display!

Settings

Budgie 10.4 moves Settings out of Raven and into a dedicated application.
This new Budgie Settings application enables us to improve the user
experience of managing panels, applets, and their respective settings,
as well as providing us the opportunity to describe what particular
settings may do, with the classic example being “Disable unredirection
of windows”. To open Budgie Settings, the behavior of the Settings button
at the bottom of Raven has been changed to open Budgie Settings instead
of GNOME Control Center. You can also pin our Settings application to
your panel, like you would any application, and launch it via Budgie Menu.

n the image above, you can see the management of the Bottom Panel. We
have split panel management into two sections, with Applets being the
primary section (as we anticipate users primarily making changes to
applets) and Settings. Similar to the behavior of prior Budgie releases,
you can move applets around using the up or down arrow buttons, or delete
them. These buttons are positioned at the top of the list to make them
more easily accessible for lower-resolution displays.

To the right of the applet list, you have a dedicated “Add applet” button
and settings for the selected applet below.

In the Settings section of a panel, a multitude of options are exposed, such as:

-Position of the panel
-Size of the panel (height for vertical panels, width for horizontal panels)
-Auto-hide settings (including Intellihide, which is great for Dock mode)
-Transparency settings (as discussed in the Panels -> Transparency section of
this blog post)
-Shadow (a decorative drop shadow)
-Stylize region
-Dock mode

Budgie Settings also enables you to manage the autostarting of applications,
eliminating the need for a secondary tool such as GNOME Tweak Tool.

Other Fixes and Improvements

In addition to the above mentioned goodies, some other fixes include:

The Clock applet will now only redraw when the label contents would change.
This resolves unnecessary redraws of the applet.
daemon: Fixed the order of left-side window buttons, ensuring that the window
decoration style is consistent between native and CSD window decorations.
wm: Ensuring we purge old backgrounds from the cache.

Copyright © 2015-2017 Solus Project.
