System76, the developers of the Linux distribution Pop!_OS, have released the desktop environment COSMIC 1.2.0. This release is now available in the distribution kit Pop!_OS 24.04 and will soon be accessible in other distributions like Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Aeyrin OS, Redox, and CachyOS. The code for COSMIC is written in Rust and is distributed under the GPLv3 (applications) and MPL-2.0 (libraries) licenses.
COSMIC is a universal project developed independently of any specific distribution and adheres to Freedesktop specifications. The interface in COSMIC is built using the Iced library, which employs safe types, a modular architecture, and reactive programming. It also provides an architecture similar to the declarative interface construction language Elm. Multiple rendering engines are supported, including Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+, and OpenGL ES 2.0+. Developers have access to a set of widgets, asynchronous