Its design emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and elegance, while providing the means to extend or customize the desktop in various ways.

Budgie was created by Ikey Doherty as the default desktop environment for his new Linux distribution, EvolveOS, which was eventually renamed to Solus.

During this time, contributors to the project that had ceased involvement with Solus began contributing to other Linux distributions.

[5] Budgie Desktop View is implemented in Vala, and uses GTK 3 for widgets.

Magpie is a fork of the GNOME Project's Mutter window manager with Wayland support removed, principally intended to reduce the maintenance burden of GNOME stack upgrades by stabilizing on a particular version of the Mutter API.

Budgie has been generally well received, with reviews noting its appealing visual design and intuitive layout.

However, King also considered this a negative, writing that Budgie "can feel more like a customized version of GNOME than a separate entity.