System76 announced the beta release of the COSMIC desktop environment, written in Rust. The first beta release of the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution, bundled with COSMIC, was also released. The first stable release of COSMIC was originally planned for Q1 2025, but development was delayed, and more than a year after the publication of the first alpha version, the project has only reached beta. ISO images of the Pop!_OS 24.04-Beta distribution for systems with NVIDIA (3.1 GB) and Intel/AMD (2.7 GB) GPUs are available for testing the beta version. Packages with the COSMIC beta version for Fedora, NixOS, and Arch are expected soon. Linux, openSUSE, Serpent OS, Redox and CachyOS.
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:
- A panel that displays 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 sections, such as an upper section with a menu and indicators, and a lower section with a list of active tasks and shortcuts. Panel sections can be arranged vertically or horizontally, occupy the entire screen width or only a selected area, use transparency, change style depending on the choice of light or dark theme, and be customized separately for each section. virtual desktop.
- Window arrangement 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 arrangement modes can be combined and enabled for a specific virtual desktop.
- 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 ability to use virtual desktops that can be scrolled in overview mode, rearranged, and moved to another screen.
- 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.
- An application launcher interface and an application library that allows you to group programs by topic.
- 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.
- Composite server Cosmic-comp is based on Wayland. It supports the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) mechanism, which adaptively changes the monitor's refresh rate to ensure smooth, tear-free gaming and video playback.
Changes in the Pop!_OS 24.04-Beta distribution include:
- Replacing the desktop environment with a new COSMIC implementation 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 media player have been replaced by 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 April 24.04. Kernel versions updated Linux 6.16.3, Mesa 25.1.5, NVIDIA 580 drivers, libwayland/libwayland-client 1.23.1 and libdrm 2.4.125.
Source: opennet.ru
