After three years of development, the COSMIC 1.0.0 desktop environment, written in Rust, has been released. Test ISO images of the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution (3.5 GB) are available for evaluation. COSMIC 1.0 packages for Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Serpent OS, Redox, and CachyOS are expected to be available soon.
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.
Key features of COSMIC:
- Several window layout modes: multi-window, tile, and stack. In tile mode, the position of new windows on the screen is automatically selected and aligned to the grid. In stack mode, application windows are grouped similar to browser tabs. Window layout modes can be combined and enabled for a specific virtual desktop.
- A panel that displays a list of active windows, shortcuts to quick access to applications, and applets (built-in applications that run in separate processes). The panel can be divided into parts, for example, the upper part with menus and indicators, and the lower part with a list of active tasks and shortcuts. Parts of the panel can be placed both vertically and horizontally, occupy the entire width of the screen or only a selected area, use transparency, change the style depending on the choice of light and dark design, and be configured separately for each virtual desktop.
- An application launcher interface and an application library that allows you to group programs by topic.
- Applets with an application menu, an interface for switching between windows and virtual desktops, a search system, a calculator, a dialog for running custom commands, indicators for changing the keyboard layout, controlling media playback, changing the volume, controlling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, showing notifications, displaying the time, and calling the shutdown screen.
- The ability to use virtual desktops that can be scrolled in overview mode, rearranged, and moved to another screen.
- Support for customizing themes, choosing between dark and light themes, saving design settings for use on other systems, cycling through a collection of desktops, and placing icons on the desktop.
- The cosmic-comp composite server is based on Wayland. It supports VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), which adaptively changes the monitor's refresh rate to ensure smooth, tear-free gaming and video playback.
- A basic set of applications, including a file manager, text editor, media player, terminal emulator, and application installation manager. The file manager can be used as an image viewer with gallery mode support. The media player uses the Vulkan graphics API for rendering, and VAAPI can be used for video decoding.
- A configurator that allows you to change settings for the panel, desktop, background images, appearance, windows, localization, accounts, input devices, screen, power modes, sound, Bluetooth, wired and wireless connections.
Source: opennet.ru
