System76, the company behind the Pop!_OS Linux distribution, has released the desktop environment COSMIC 1.8.0. Packages for COSMIC 1.8.0 are available in Pop!_OS 24.04 and are expected soon in Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Aeyrin OS, Redox, and CachyOS. The code is written in Rust and is distributed under GPLv3 (applications) and MPL-2.0 (libraries) licenses.
COSMIC develops as a universal project, independent of any specific distribution and compliant with Freedesktop specifications. The interface in COSMIC is built using the Iced library, which employs safe types, a modular architecture, and a reactive programming model, offering an architecture familiar to developers acquainted with the declarative interface building language Elm. Several rendering engines are provided, supporting Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+, and OpenGL ES 2.0+. Developers are offered a ready-to-use widget set, the ability to create asynchronous handlers, and utilize adaptive layout of interface elements depending on window and screen size.
In addition to using Rust, notable features of COSMIC include hybrid tiled window layout modes and stacked window anchoring (grouping windows like browser tabs), which can be enabled in conjunction with virtual desktops. The project is also developing a compositor server cosmic-comp based on Wayland.
Among the changes:
- The composite manager cosmic-comp has significantly improved touch screen support.
- The composite manager cosmic-comp now allows launching X11 applications in a minimized state. Support has been added for configuring the default window decoration mode. serverA crash issue when taking screenshots has been resolved. Improved support for hybrid configurations with integrated GPUs and discrete graphics cards has been implemented. Selective corner rounding in themes has been streamlined.
- The Smithay library has been updated, leading to better mouse pointer capture support.
- The Bluetooth management applet and configurator now allows assigning custom names to Bluetooth devices.
- The application library (cosmic-app-library) now centers the names of applications displayed under the icons.
- The file manager has added automatic switching to another tab when closing the active tab.
- Two-factor authentication support has been established on the login screen.
- An on-screen keyboard is under development, which is not yet included in COSMIC releases. The on-screen keyboard now includes an indicator for switching keyboard layouts and supports external layout switching (for example, via key combinations on a physical keyboard).
Source: opennet.ru
