System76 has announced the readiness of the beta version of the COSMIC desktop environment, written in Rust. At the same time, the first beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution, which comes with COSMIC, has been introduced. Initially, the first stable release of COSMIC was planned for the first quarter of 2025, but development has been delayed, and over a year after the publication of the first alpha version, the project has only reached the beta stage. ISO images of the Pop!_OS 24.04-Beta for systems with NVIDIA GPU (3.1 GB) and Intel/AMD (2.7 GB) are available for testing the beta version. Packages with the beta version of COSMIC for Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Serpent OS, Redox, and CachyOS are expected soon.
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.
Key features of COSMIC:
- A panel displaying a list of active windows, shortcuts for quick access to applications, and applets (built-in applications running in separate processes). The panel can be divided into parts, such as the upper part with the menu and indicators and the lower part with the list of active tasks and quick access shortcuts. The panel parts can be arranged either vertically or horizontally, occupy the entire width of the screen or only a selected area, use transparency, change style depending on light and dark themes, and be configured separately for each. virtual desktops.
- Window layout modes: tiled, mosaic, and stacked. In mosaic mode, the position for new windows on the screen is automatically chosen and aligned to a grid. In stacked mode, the grouping of application windows is done similarly to tabs in a browser. Window placement modes can be combined and linked to a specific virtual desktop.
- Support for theme customization, selection between dark and light themes, saving appearance settings for use on other systems, cyclic display of a collection of desktops, and placement of icons on the desktop.
- The ability to use virtual desktops, which can be scrolled in an overview mode, regrouped, and moved to another screen.
- Applets with application menus, a window-switching interface, and virtual desktops, a search system, a calculator, a dialog for executing arbitrary commands, indicators for changing the keyboard layout, controlling multimedia playback, adjusting volume, managing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, displaying notifications, showing the time, and calling the shutdown screen.
- The application launcher interface and application library that allows grouping programs by theme.
- A basic set of applications including a file manager, text editor, multimedia player, terminal emulator, and application installer. The file manager can be used as an image viewer with gallery mode support. The multimedia player uses the Vulkan graphics API for rendering, while VAAPI can be utilized for video decoding.
- A configurator that allows changing settings for the panel, desktop, wallpapers, appearance, windows, localization, user accounts, input devices, screen, power modes, sound, Bluetooth, and wired and wireless connections.
- Composite server cosmic-comp based on Wayland. It supports the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) mechanism, which adaptively changes the monitor's refresh rate to ensure smoothness and prevents tearing during gaming and video playback.
Among the changes in the Pop!_OS 24.04-Beta distribution:
- Replacement of the desktop environment with a new implementation of COSMIC, written in Rust (the previously supplied user environment was based on GNOME Shell).
- The GNOME Files file manager, GNOME Terminal terminal emulator, GNOME Text Editor text editor, and Totem multimedia player have been replaced with COSMIC Files, COSMIC Terminal, COSMIC Text Editor, and COSMIC Media Player applications.
- To install additional programs, the COSMIC Store application is used instead of Pop!_Shop.
- The package base is synchronized with Ubuntu 24.04. Updated versions include Linux kernel 6.16.3, Mesa 25.1.5, NVIDIA drivers 580, libwayland/libwayland-client 1.23.1, and libdrm 2.4.125.
Source: opennet.ru
