When comparing Budgie vs Hawaii, the Slant community recommends Budgie for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for convertible laptops?” Budgie is ranked 4th while Hawaii is ranked 19th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro It's minimal and gorgeous
Pro It's maintained by a dedicated bunch of folks with an eye for detail
Pro Modern design
Pro Built from scratch and integrates into current technolgies
Budgie is built from scratch to integrate with the Gnome stack, this way hopefully having more stability by utilizing technologies that have a lot of community work already behind them.
Pro Very lightweight
Runs well on low-end hardware and gaming PC’s alike.
Pro Many large distros support it out of the box
Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and Budgie's own Solus all support Budgie.
Pro No big memory leaks
It can be run for weeks with no noticeable increase in memory usage. That is a vast improvement over gnome-shell.
Pro Can emulate Gnome 2 desktop look
The Budgie desktop can emulate the classic Gnome 2 look.
Pro Simple and clean
Every aspect of the shell has been crafted to fit together as a harmonious whole, in order to offer a consistent user experience.
Pro Designed for productivity
Loads and executes applications faster while preserving system resources.
Minimalist design that puts the workflow at the center, the workspace is not designed to be a show case of fancy 3d effects with applets everywhere but a mean to get the work done.
Pro Adheres to standards
Supports freedesktop.org standards.
Pro Low system resource consumption
Runs on netbooks and older computers, even some small ARM-based machines.
Pro Supports ARM-based mini PCs
Runs on Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2, Wandboard and other ARM-based mini PCs.
Pro Very fast startup
The workspace loads in a couple of seconds.
Pro Easy to use
Pro Smooth subtle animations
Cons
Con Not a desktop environment
It's just a replacement for the GNOME-shell and you still need a GNOME-desktop installed at the same time.
Con Sometimes buggy
Budgie can sometimes be buggy.
Con Less lightweight than you would expect
Budgie has a nice and simple style, but the memory usage is quite high after booting. Thankfully, the lead developer is working to remedy this.
Con Does not properly support multi monitor
Having two monitors works, but it's not perfect.
Con Has not switched to Qt as promised
Very dependable on Gnome
Con Very hard to install
Installing in distros that are not Ubuntu-based can be hard.
Con Lacks some basic features
Many things you'd take for granted aren't available in Budgie, like an option for showing windows from all workspaces when alt-tabbing.
Con Issues with proprietary drivers and Mutter
Mutter causes issues with screen tearing and microstuttering in most applications especially with NVidia GPUs.
Con Still in development
Budgie is still young and in active development, so it may not be as stable as many other desktop environments.
Con Just another GNOME-shell alternative
You still have to install and use GNOME software.
Con Not reached version 1.0 yet
A stable version has not been released yet.