System76, a company developing LinuxPop!_OS, the distribution, has released the COSMIC 1.7.0 desktop environment. Packages for COSMIC 1.7.0 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:
- The composite manager now supports scalable cursors that maintain clarity as they increase in size.
- The magnifying glass tool has a larger zoom increment, reducing the number of hotkey presses required to zoom in on content.
- A temporary increase in cursor size has been implemented during active, random mouse movements to make it easier to identify its location on the screen. An option has been added to the configurator to enable this effect.
- A field for searching applications has been added to the Open with dialog for opening files in selected applications.
- xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic implements the org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop portal, which allows the use of emulated input devices, such as using Steam Input to control the keyboard and mouse.
- The file manager now features improved performance when working with network file systems, and navigation of network storage devices from any tab is now supported (for example, entering smb://server/share in the address bar is now supported in local file browsing tabs). Support for renaming elements in the Favorite File Paths panel has been added.
- Fixed errors that caused the panel to crash.
- The start-cosmic script now supports POSIX sh (previously bash was required).
Source: opennet.ru
