System76, the company behind the Pop!_OS Linux distribution, has released the COSMIC desktop environment version 1.6.0. Packages for COSMIC 1.6.0 are available in Pop!_OS 24.04 and will soon arrive in Fedora, NixOS, Arch 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 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 ability to customize the volume level and output settings in relation to individual applications has been added.
- The terminal emulator now features the ability to visually separate borders between panels.
- In the file manager, the search bar now supports copy and paste operations via the clipboard.
- Preparation has been made for the implementation of input capture and remote desktop access capabilities. Support for the Emulated Input (EI) protocol has been added.
- The composite manager supports version 6 of the linux-dmabuf protocol, which provides tools for working with multiple graphics cards when rendering on a different GPU (for example, a discrete graphics card instead of the integrated one).
- When displaying desktop wallpapers, information about the image rotation present in the EXIF metadata is taken into account.
- Cosmic-greeter now supports images in JPEG-XL and AVIF formats and has implemented the Wayland protocol cosmic-keymap-unstable-v1.
Source: opennet.ru
