System76, a company developing LinuxPop!_OS, the distribution, has released the COSMIC 1.3.0 desktop environment. Packages for COSMIC 1.3.0 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 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.
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.
Major changes:
- Added a "Frosted glass" transparency effect that blurs the background image that covers the window in a frosted glass style similar to the Liquid Glass effect in macOSThe effect is implemented using the Wayland ext-background-effect protocol, which provides stylization of translucent parts of Wayland surfaces.
- The network connection management applet and configurator have been switched from direct access to NetworkManager to using the nmrs layer.
- The keyboard layout switching applet (input-sources) has been switched to use the Wayland protocol cosmic-keymap-unstable-v1, support for which is implemented in the cosmic-comp composite manager and the cosmic-settings-daemon background process.
- To support Avif images, the cosmic-bg desktop wallpaper service uses the libdav1d library.
- The file manager now allows you to select subclasses when filtering content by MIME types.
- The cosmic-monitor application, which displays information about the system, running processes, and resource consumption, now supports statistics collection for Intel GPUs, implements calculation of power consumption for AMD and Intel GPUs, and provides display of data on GPU power consumption and video memory status.
- The positioning of applet pop-up windows has been improved in the panel. Options have been added for hiding the panel and maintaining the style when opening windows to full screen.
- The configurator now supports using AVIF images for desktop wallpaper.
- The context menu now displays the discrete GPU by default.
Source: opennet.ru
