System76, a company that develops the Linux distribution Pop!_OS, has officially released the desktop environment COSMIC 1.6.0. The packages for COSMIC 1.6.0 are available in the distribution kit Pop!_OS 24.04 and are expected to be included in other distributions such as Fedora, NixOS, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Aeyrin OS, Redox, and CachyOS in the near future. The code for COSMIC is written in Rust and distributed under the GPLv3 for applications and MPL-2.0 for libraries.
COSMIC is designed as a universal project that is not limited to a specific distribution and complies with Freedesktop specifications. The interface in COSMIC is built using the Iced library, which utilizes safe types, modular architecture, reactive programming, and offers an architecture familiar to developers accustomed to declarative construction of interfaces in Elm. Multiple rendering engines supporting Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+, and OpenGL ES 2.0+ are provided. Developers can access a set of widgets, create asynchronous handlers, and utilize adaptive layout for interface elements based on window and screen size.
Aside from utilizing the Rust language, COSMIC also features hybrid mosaic window layout and stacked window pinning modes, which can be enabled alongside virtual desktops. The project is working on a composite server called cosmic-comp based on Wayland.
Some of the key changes in COSMIC include the ability to adjust volume levels and output parameters for individual applications, visual configuration of boundaries in the terminal emulator, implementation of copy and paste operations via the clipboard in the file manager’s search function, and preparations for input capture and remote desktop access capabilities. Support for the input emulation protocol EI (Emulated Input) has also been added.