System76, the company developing the Pop!_OS Linux distribution, has released the COSMIC desktop environment 1.7.0. Packages for COSMIC 1.7.0 are available in the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution and will soon be available 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 compositing manager now supports scalable cursors that retain sharpness when enlarged.
- In the 'magnifier' tool, the scaling step has been increased, reducing the number of hotkey presses needed to zoom in on content.
- A temporary cursor enlargement effect has been implemented when the mouse moves erratically to help locate it on the screen. A corresponding option has been added to the configurator to enable this effect.
- The file open dialog in selected applications ('Open with') has been updated with a search field for applications.
- In xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic, the org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop portal has been implemented, allowing the use of emulated input devices, such as using Steam Input for keyboard and mouse control.
- The file manager has improved performance with network file systems and enabled navigation through network storage from any tab (for example, entering smb://server/share in the address bar is now allowed in tabs for viewing local files). Support for renaming items in the favorites panel for file paths has also been added.
- Fixed bugs that led to the panel crashing.
- The start-cosmic script now supports POSIX sh (previously required bash).
Source: opennet.ru
