System76, the developer of the Pop!_OS Linux distribution, has released the fifth alpha version of the COSMIC desktop environment written in Rust (not to be confused with the old COSMIC, which was based on GNOME Shell). ISO images with the latest version of COSMIC, built on top of alpha builds of the upcoming Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution for systems with NVIDIA (2.9 GB) and Intel/AMD (2.5 GB) GPUs, are available for testing. Ready-made packages for Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Serpent OS, Redox, and CachyOS are also being created.
COSMIC is being developed as a universal project, not tied to a specific distribution and corresponding to the Freedesktop specifications. To build the interface, COSMIC uses the Iced library, which uses safe types, a modular architecture and a reactive programming model, and also offers 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 use adaptive layout of interface elements depending on the window and screen size.
In addition to using the Rust language, COSMIC features include hybrid window tiling and stacked window pinning (window grouping similar to browser tabs), which can be enabled in conjunction with virtual desktops. The project is also developing a Wayland-based cosmic-comp composite server. The first stable release of COSMIC is scheduled for Q2025 XNUMX.
The main changes compared to the fourth alpha version of COSMIC:
- By default, the native COSMIC Media Player is used, which uses the Vulkan graphics API for rendering and VAAPI for video decoding. A separate application for installing codecs is also in development, which will eventually replace sessioninstaller.
- A page for managing user accounts has been added to the configurator, through which you can change the parameters of your account. Users with administrator rights can additionally add a new user, change the data of existing users, and delegate the ability to perform privileged operations to other users.
- The ContextDrawer widget now supports placing buttons in the header. For example, in the file manager, the right panel with additional information about the file, implemented using ContextDrawer, has been supplemented with the buttons "<", ">" and "[]" for going to the previous and next file, as well as opening the file in a separate application.
- The file manager now has the ability to save new files in a new directory. Support for renaming files in search results has been added. The context menu shown in the recently opened files section now has an option to view the directory where the selected file is stored.
- In the interface for switching between active windows, called via Alt+Tab, the order of displaying application windows now corresponds to the order in which the user works with applications (the first window will be the one that the user has worked with previously, and the last one will be the one that the user has not accessed for the longest time). To scroll in the opposite order, you can use the combination Alt + Shift + Tab.
- Expanded support for the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) mechanism, which allows adaptive changes to the monitor refresh rate to ensure smoothness and absence of tearing during games and video playback. When using VRR, the minimum screen refresh rate is now taken into account, which guarantees smooth cursor movement even if the application uses a lower frequency when outputting. The change is mainly noticeable when opening non-gaming applications in full-screen mode.
- Added the ability to open links from the terminal emulator by left-clicking on the URL.
Source: opennet.ru
