System76, which develops the Linux distribution Pop!_OS, published the release of the desktop environment COSMIC 1.10.0. Packages with COSMIC 1.10.0 are available in the distribution kit Pop!_OS 24.04 and are expected in the near future in Fedora, NixOS, Arch 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.
To build the interface in COSMIC, the Iced library is used, which uses safe types, modular architecture and the reactive programming, and 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.
In addition to the use of the Rust language, COSMIC features include the modes of hybrid mosaic window layout and stacked window pinning (grouping windows similar to tabs in a browser), which can be enabled in conjunction with virtual desktops. The project is also developing a composite server cosmic-comp based on Wayland.
Among the changes:
- Added the ability to identify graphics tablets with a specific display.
- The cosmic-comp composite server supports transferring focus to windows based on touch screen events. The build system has been moved from make to the just utility. An issue with the panel and virtual desktops on systems with hybrid graphics that combine NVIDIA graphics cards with integrated GPUs has been resolved.
- Cosmic-launcher uses the WGPU API, running on top of Vulkan, Metal, D3D12 and OpenGL, to improve rendering performance by default.
