After three years of development, the desktop environment release COSMIC 1.0.0, written in Rust, has been published. To evaluate the performance of COSMIC 1.0, test iso images of the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution kit (3.5 GB) are offered. In the near future, packages with COSMIC 1.0 for Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Serpent OS, Redox, and CachyOS will be available.
COSMIC is being developed as a universal project that is not tied to a specific distribution and complies with Freedesktop specifications. To build the interface in COSMIC, the Iced library is used, which uses safe types, modular architecture, and reactive programming. It also offers an architecture familiar to developers familiar with the language of declarative construction of interfaces Elm. 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 use adaptive layout of interface elements depending on the size of the window and screen.
Main features of COSMIC:
- Several window layout modes are offered, including multi-window, tiled, and stacked. In tiled mode, the position for new windows on the screen is automatically selected and aligned to the grid. In stacked mode, application windows are grouped similarly to tabs in a browser. Window placement modes can be combined and enabled in relation to a specific virtual desktop.
