Broken budgie

I read the article about PCLOS Debian from the PCLOS Mag article here: https://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/202405/page01.html

I thought I'd install Budgie on a spare partition and see what I could do with it.

Sadly I couldn't do much.

1 -- I liked the concept of the Raven sidebar, but with only 5 apps available, and not particularly good ones at that, it's not going to be much use. If the calendar connected to a proper diary, giving appointments in the sidebar, that could be useful. But it doesn't do anything when you click on a date.

2 -- I'm not a fan of dark desktop schemes, so I rate distros and desktops on how easy it is to change to ones I like. I can use Budgie Desktop Settings to change the colour of programs like File Manager to light or medium schemes. However, it doesn't change the colour of Budgie Desktop Settings itself, although it does change the colour of Budgie Control Centre. And it doesn't affect the Panel. There seems no way at all to change the colour scheme of the panel, a barely-readable dark grey on darker grey.

3 -- I should be able to set my wallpaper by right clicking on an image in the file manager and selecting "Set as Background... " from the resulting menu. The three dots imply that a dialogue box will appear which will enable me to complete the job, but nothing happens at all. I've not been able to find any way of changing my wallpaper.

The question I have to ask is this: is there stuff missing that I need to add in order to get things to work better?

Upgreyed wrote:You can easily change the background to your specific image if you open it up with Image Viewer r/click add image to desktop.

Yes, this does work, however, there should not be the menu option to change the desktop wallpaper from the File Manager if  this doesn't work.

Changing the themes and icons changes from dark mode. R/click on the desktop > Budgie desktop settings > Turn off built in theme.
You will get the blinding white desktop as you like instead of the dark theme.

Nope. I got the white (too white!) desktop already, with "Built-in Theme" turned off. I just worked out that the way to get the light panel is in the Widgets settings! It goes from grey on dark grey to pale grey on white! Either way it's not great. But at least something to work on.

Another annoyance is that the Workspace Switcher panel has no edges to the buttons. In order to switch workspaces you have to hover over the part of the panel it's on, and wait for the popup to see which Workspace you will switch to.

Before I give up on this, I will look on line to see if there are other themes/panel apps/raven apps I can add. Budgie certainly has potential, but feels unfinished to me.