Development on COSMIC, a new open-source desktop environment created by developers a Linux-based hardware company System76, continues at pace, with a 4th alpha now available.
System76 said new alpha releases of the COSMIC DE would roughly appear once a month (give or take), a cadence that enables them flesh out the features planned for its first stable release and get feedback from users, developers, and distribution packagers.
Alongside the new alpha is a freshly-spun ISO of Pop!_OS 24.04 (Alpha), making it easy to check out the changes for yourself on a spare partition, USB drive, or virtual machine. But the COSMIC DE alphas are available on other distros too, including Arch Linux.
As for what’s new in COSMIC Alpha 4, read on.
COSMIC Alpha 4: Key Changes
The first alpha of COSMIC delivered the core basics, and each alpha release since has added to the capabilities, filled in gaps, ironed out kinks, buffed the user-interface, and put up scaffolding on which future planned features rely.
COSMIC Alpha 4 is no different.
The Settings app now has 2 new panels:
First, there’s now a functional Region & Language panel with options to set preferred languages, language, and changing the formatting used for date, time, and numbers. It’s nice that formatting region can be set independently of language.
Secondly, the System & Accounts section offers Default Applications preferences. This means you can change you default web browser, file manager, and choose which apps open by default when you click on MP3s, MP4s, images, and so on.
COSMIC Alpha 4 also adds new settings in some existing panels as well.
There are new power management options in Power & Battery to control display time-out when your system is left idle, and suspend options (if you’re using a device with a battery).
And Display settings now offers a means to control variable refresh rate (VRR) support. VRR can be set left on at all times or set to automatic, which enables VRR when content goes fullscreen.
Elsewhere, the COSMIC Store introduces a collapsable details panel to monitor any in-progress app updates and installs, and see a list of recently completed tasks.
Accessibility work continues. There’s a new Accessibility applet that can be added to the dock. It’s an early stage of development in this alpha, but the applet provides easy access to turn screenreader support on and off.
And now that screenreader support works in COSMIC Settings, Mozilla Firefox, and GNOME applications, that’s a handle toggle to have. Screenreader support in other core COSMIC apps is (obviously) planned, but not yet ready.
Beyond those highlights, there are plenty of performance tune-ups, bug fixes, and lots of tweaks to improve the user experience, e.g, tiling layouts readjust when display settings are changed, and its possible for files to stay selected after an action is performed.
Looking ahead, COSMIC Player is a new Gstreamer-based media/video player in development.
A snapshot is available to install from the repos in Pop_OS! 24.04, so whether you use the new ISO or you’re upgrading on an older one, you can install it from the COSMIC Store, or run:
sudo apt install cosmic-player
In all, another welcome clutch of updates for this promising, unique desktop environment.