We’re fixing to fix your unfulfilled fix for more COSMIC with a new COSMIC blog. And here it is! We’ve been hard at work building out features, polishing up implementations, and getting ready to unleash the alpha release of the COSMIC desktop environment to the world. Here…are the updates!

Mirroring

Display mirroring is nearly finished, including cases where resolutions, orientations, and refresh rates are different than on the displays being mirrored. Next steps include implementing support for display mirroring into COSMIC Settings and cosmic-randr, as well as completing further optimizations.

ARM architecture support

We’re building arm64 packages for Pop!_OS 24.04. On a related note, System76 now offers Starling ARM servers for high-performance ARM build CI and AI inference workloads.

COSMIC App Store

The ultra-fast COSMIC App Store is nearly implemented! All that’s left for the alpha is to polish up some minor UX issues.

System76 CEO Carl Richell expressed his amazement at the speed of the COSMIC App Store: “I've used the terminal to update systems for years. But the COSMIC App Store is so fast, and lays out the information so well, that I found it's more efficient to update via the app than command line.”

COSMIC Files

GVfs (GNOME Virtual file system) integration was added for handling external storage, such as flash drives or network shares. Meanwhile, a new context menu in Files navigation has also been added.

COSMIC Greeter

COSMIC Greeter has been integrated with logind, adding the ability to lock the session on an idle timer, as well as unlock a suspended session.

COSMIC Edit

COSMIC Edit now supports CRLF-encoded files, which are commonly used on Windows.

Drag-and-Drop

The ability to drag-and-drop text and images has been added for COSMIC Files, segmented buttons, and the libcosmic navigation menu. A few compositor bugs related to drag-and-drop were fixed as well.

Copy/Paste

Clipboard support has been implemented for both the Launcher and the App Library.

Libcosmic

A generic context menu widget has been added to the libcosmic widget library to enable the ability to use context menus anywhere. Context menus were also added to the segmented button widget to support right-click menus on elements such as navigation bar buttons.

Theming Fixes

Custom light mode themes were seeing some errors. For example, certain elements were not receiving an appropriate contrasting color, while some widgets were not inheriting the correct colors. Darker background colors generated even darker containers. Light Mode was therefore deemed inebriated and sent home, until improvements were made to ensure the implementation matched design intentions.

Text and buttons in the header weren’t all inheriting the users’ chosen accent color. To help them see the error of their ways, we’ve made some tweaks.

More theme and appearance improvements:

• Icon themes have been added to the App Library.
• Slider and toggler radii updates
• Panel corners now match the users’ round, slightly round, and square preference.
• Applet size fixes

More Fixes!

• Screenshots are now working for scaled displays.
• The network applet can now connect to wireless networks that don’t require a password.
• Support for nested pop-ups has been added to the iced-sctk back-end of libcosmic.
• Scrolling now respects the axis being scrolled, so for example, a horizontal scroll inside of a larger vertical scroll won't steal the scroll event.
• Animation state for cosmic-time is now reset when the applet pop-ups are created.

Compositor Fixes

• Fixed a couple memory leaks, including a leak with screen capture buffers.
• Fixed an issue that was preventing the compositor from using cursor planes.

COSMIC Community

The COSMUNITY continues to impress with breakneck ingenuity. For anyone who wishes to join in on the fun of COSMIC app development, Eduardo (edfloreshz) has created a GitHub template for creating COSMIC applications. His task manager, COSMIC Tasks, now has an emoji picker for list icons. The project’s new Flatpak manifest means it can be expected on Flathub soon.

Meanwhile, Piotr (elevenhsoft — it needs to be said that this username contains eleven characters) made a COSMIC web app manager, “written with love and libcosmic,” which is in the process of being added to Flathub.

Piotr also submitted an improvement to libcosmic to use GNOME's dark theme preference when in a GNOME session.

Dominic (leb-kuchen) has created an input sources applet which allows quick access to adjusting keyboard layout and settings.

COSMIC at LFNW

Our team from System76 had an amazing time sharing COSMIC DE with you at LinuxFest Northwest! Check out our recap of the event, and watch our presentation of COSMIC from the conference!