System76, a company developing LinuxThe Pop!_OS distribution has published a progress report on a new version of its COSMIC user environment, rewritten in Rust (not to be confused with the older COSMIC, which was based on GNOME Shell). The environment is being developed as a general-purpose project, not tied to a specific distribution and compliant with Freedesktop specifications. The project is also developing a Wayland-based composite server, cosmic-comp.
COSMIC uses the Iced library for its interface, 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. It provides multiple rendering engines supporting Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+, and OpenGL ES 2.0+, as well as a windowing framework and web integration engine. Iced-based applications can be built for Windows, macOS, Linux and launch in a web browser. 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. The code is distributed under the MIT license.
Among the latest achievements in the development of COSMIC:
- A new panel has been proposed that displays a list of active windows, shortcuts for quick access to applications and supports the placement of applets (embedded applications that run in separate processes). For example, applets implement the application menu, the interface for switching between desktops and indicators for changing the keyboard layout, controlling the playback of multimedia files, changing the volume, controlling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, showing the output of a list of accumulated notifications, displaying the time and calling the screen to shut down. There are plans to implement applets with weather forecast, notes, clipboard management and implementation of user menus.
The panel can be divided into parts, for example, the top one with menus and indicators, and the bottom one 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 the selected area, use transparency, change style depending on the choice of light and dark design.
- System76 Scheduler 2.0, an automatic optimization service, has been released. It dynamically adjusts the CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) task scheduler parameters and changes process execution priorities to reduce latency and ensure maximum performance for the process associated with the active window the user is currently working with. The new version features integration with multimedia. server Pipewire to increase the priority of processes that output multimedia content; transition to a new configuration file format, in which you can define your own rules and control the application of various optimization modes; the ability to apply settings based on the state of cgroups and parent processes is provided; resource consumption in the main Scheduler process has been reduced by approximately 75%.
- An implementation of the configurator prepared using the new widget library is available. The first version of the configurator offers settings for the panel, keyboard, and desktop wallpaper. In the future, the number of pages with settings will be increased. The configurator has a modular architecture that allows you to easily connect additional pages with settings.
- Preparations are underway to integrate support for high dynamic range (HDR) displays and color management tools (for example, support for ICC color profiles is planned). Development is still in the early stages and is being synchronized with the overall work to provide HDR support and color management tools for Linux.
- Into composite server cosmic-comp added support for output with 10-bit per channel color representation.
- The iced GUI library is working on supporting tools for people with disabilities. Experimental integration with the AccessKit library has been carried out and the ability to use Orca screen readers has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
