System76, a company developing LinuxPop!_OS, the distribution, has released the COSMIC 1.2.0 desktop environment. Packages for COSMIC 1.2.0 are available in Pop!_OS 24.04 and are expected to be available in Fedora, NixOS, and Arch soon. 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 being developed as a general-purpose project, not tied to a specific distribution and conforming to the Freedesktop specifications.
COSMIC's interface is built using the Iced library, which utilizes type-safe design, a modular architecture, and a reactive programming model. It also offers an architecture familiar to developers familiar with the Elm declarative interface language. Multiple 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.
In addition to using the Rust language, COSMIC's key features include hybrid window tiling and stacked window docking (window grouping similar to browser tabs), which can be enabled when linked to virtual desktops. The project is also developing a composite server cosmic-comp based on Wayland.
Main changes compared to version 1.1.0:
- The cosmic-bg desktop wallpaper installation service now supports the AVIF image format.
- The network connection and Bluetooth applets have been migrated to a spinner provided by the libcosmic library to indicate the ongoing connection process. A similar indicator is used when waiting for authentication to complete during login and when loading packages in the application manager.
- In composite server Cosmic-comp has resolved an issue with screen flickering on systems with Intel GPUs based on the Meteor, Arrow, and Lunar Lake microarchitectures. Flickering when opening the virtual desktop switching interface and when launching the application menu has also been eliminated.
- The cosmic-edit text editor now places a document in the list of recently used files when writing a document.
- The file manager now allows you to view subdirectories in the Recycle Bin, and checksum information has been added to the file properties panel.
- The cosmic-monitor application now supports horizontal scrolling on pages with lists of processes and applications.
- In xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic, the build has been switched to using the just utility instead of make.
Source: opennet.ru
