System76, a company developing LinuxPop!_OS, the distribution, has released the COSMIC 1.6.0 desktop environment. Packages for COSMIC 1.6.0 are available in Pop!_OS 24.04 and are expected to be available in Fedora, NixOS, and Arch soon. Linux, openSUSE, Aeyrin OS, Redox, and CachyOS. The code is written in Rust and distributed under the GPLv3 (applications) and MPL-2.0 (libraries) licenses.
COSMIC is being developed as a universal project, not tied to a specific distribution and compliant with Freedesktop specifications. COSMIC's interface is built using the Iced library, which utilizes type-safe design, a modular architecture, and a reactive programming model, offering an architecture familiar to developers familiar with the Elm declarative interface language. Several rendering engines are provided, supporting Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+, and OpenGL ES 2.0+. Developers are offered a ready-made set of widgets, the ability to create asynchronous handlers, and adaptive layout of interface elements based on window and screen size.
In addition to using the Rust language, COSMIC's key features include hybrid window tiling and stacked window docking (window grouping similar to browser tabs), which can be enabled when linked to virtual desktops. The project is also developing a composite server cosmic-comp based on Wayland.
Among the changes:
- Added the ability to individually change the volume level and output parameters for individual applications.
- The terminal emulator now allows you to customize the visual separation of borders between panels.
- The file manager's search bar now supports copying and pasting via the clipboard.
- Preparations have been made for the implementation of input capture and remote desktop access capabilities. Support for the EI (Emulated Input) protocol has been added.
- The composite manager implements support for version 6 of the linux-dmabuf protocol, which provides tools for working with multiple video cards when rendering on a different GPU is required (for example, on a discrete video card instead of an integrated one).
- When displaying desktop wallpapers, image rotation information contained in EXIF metadata is taken into account.
- Cosmic-greeter now supports JPEG-XL and AVIF images, and uses the cosmic-keymap-unstable-v1 Wayland protocol.
Source: opennet.ru
