The company System76, which develops the Linux distribution Pop!_OS, has published the release of the COSMIC desktop environment 1.10.0. Packages with COSMIC 1.11.0 are available in the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution and are expected soon in Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, aerynOS, Redox, and CachyOS. The code is written in Rust and is distributed under the GPLv3 (applications) and MPL-2.0 (libraries) licenses.
COSMIC is evolving as a universal project, not tied to any specific distribution, and complies with Freedesktop specifications.
The interface in COSMIC is built using the Iced library, which employs safe types, modular architecture, and a reactive programming model, and also offers 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 set of widgets, the ability to create asynchronous handlers, and utilize adaptive layout of interface elements based 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:
- In libcosmic, the interception of the Escape key press during text input has been halted, resolving issues with closing certain menus when Escape is pressed.
- In the application library (cosmic-app-library), a transition to the first application in search results has been implemented upon pressing the down cursor control key. Systems with hybrid graphics have been provided with the appropriate GPU selection when launching games.
- In the compositor server (cosmic-comp) has implemented support for the Wayland protocol "xdg-dialog-v1", allowing for the creation of modal dialogs that block user interaction with the rest of the interface. Activation of the on-screen keyboard can now be sent via a separate D-Bus signal.
- A file association for opening JSON files with the Cosmic-edit text editor has been added.
- In the configurator (cosmic-settings), options for dragging an object with a double tap on the touchpad (tap&drag) and a mode that allows briefly lifting a finger from the touchpad without interrupting the dragging process have been added.
- In the application launcher interface, case-insensitive searching has been implemented, and the search for individual words within parentheses has been improved. The correct GPU selection has also been implemented on systems with hybrid graphics.
Source: opennet.ru
