The company System76, which develops the Linux distribution Pop!_OS, has published the release of the COSMIC Desktop 1.2.0. Packages for COSMIC 1.2.0 are available in the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution and are expected soon 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 is evolving as a universal project, not tied to any specific distribution, and complies with Freedesktop specifications.
The interface in COSMIC is built using the Iced library, which employs safe types, modular architecture, and a reactive programming model, and also offers 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 set of widgets, the ability to create asynchronous handlers, and utilize adaptive layout of interface elements based 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.
Main changes compared to version 1.1.0:
- Support for AVIF image format has been added to the desktop wallpaper installation service cosmic-bg.
- The network connectivity and Bluetooth applets for indicating ongoing connection processes have been switched to a spinner provided by the libcosmic library. A similar indicator is employed when waiting for authentication to complete at login and while loading packages in the application manager.
- In the compositor server cosmic-comp, the screen flickering issue on systems with Intel GPUs based on Meteor, Arrow, and Lunar Lake microarchitectures has been resolved. Flickering when opening the virtual desktop switcher interface and launching the application menu has also been eliminated.
- In the text editor cosmic-edit, documents are now added to the recently used files list upon saving.
- The file manager now allows viewing subdirectories in the trash and includes checksum information in the file properties panel.
- The cosmic-monitor application now supports horizontal scrolling on pages with lists of processes and applications.
- The xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic has transitioned to a build using the just utility instead of make.
Source: opennet.ru
