System76 has just announced the 7th alpha release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment.
As with earlier alphas, the focus remains adding features and functionality earmarked for inclusion in the first stable release (dubbed Epoch 1).
What should you expect from that first stable release? Promise.
It makes me sound a bit of a party-popper to say that but it’s worth keeping expectations grounded. It’s unfair and unrealistic to expect the first sable release of COSMIC developed in just a couple of years to feature-match desktop environments developed over decades.
Nor will COSMIC’s native core apps, capable though they are and also built using Rust and an Iced-based toolkit, out-gun rival software yet. Apps like the bundled file manager, text editor and media player do the critical essentials but not more.
—yet.
See, despite the proverbial mountain—sorry to switch analogies—System76 set out to climb by building their own DE from scratch using newer and/or uncommon toolkits and technologies, they’re making terrific pace. Not at the summit, but making good progress.
COSMIC desktop sees new alpha builds released roughly every month, and will continue to do so until everything is in place for a beta release.
And if the ground covered between Alpha 1 to the new Alpha 7 is any indicator, a beta may not be far off.
COSMIC Alpha 7: What’s New?
New Workspace Features
COSMIC Alpha 7 supports reordering workspaces. Click and drag on a workspace thumbnail to rearrange its position among other workspaces. Sure to be handy when, mid-workflow, you’d prefer the adjacent workspace to have a specific set of apps running on it.
It’s also possible to pin workspaces in COSMIC Alpha 7.
Hover over a workspace and click the pin icon. Pinning stops a workspace getting flushed out of the thematic airlock the second there’s nothing on it. Through pinning, it’s also possible to always have a fixed number of workspaces in play.
New Accessibility Aids
Other changes in COSMIC Alpha 7 include an array of additional accessibility features.
A new Colour Filter toggle allows one of three preinstalled LUTs to be applied to all on-screen content to help users with colourblindness (Deuteranopia, Protanopia, or Tritanopia) see differentiation within on-screen colours – “corrected”, almost.
Adjunct to that, a Invert Colours option to turn things X-ray style (makes differentiating between colours easier too), and a High Contrast Mode, and a Greyscale colour filter.
In the “Hearing” section, COMSIC Alpha 7 adds a mono sound option. This does what it sounds like it does: it plays stereo audio as mono audio, i.e., merging separate left and right stereo channels into a single channel, played in each ear.
Rounding out the accessibility aids, the screen magnifier now permits disabling the on-screen overlay and super + scroll behaviour, if required.
Global Shortcuts
Among the new features in GNOME 48 came support for global keyboard shortcuts, allowing apps to offer to set app-specific shortcuts to control features which can be activated even when the app itself is not in focus or running in the background.
COSMIC Alpha 7 adds support for global shortcuts as well, albeit (seemingly) only for apps which use X11. It’s also disabled by default, but is user-configurable to respond to respond to Modifier keys all keys, or all keys only if a modifier(s) is pressed.
X11 Scaling Controls
Scaling sees a boost in COSMIC Alpha 7 as the desktop intros extras settings for XWayland fractional scaling to provide more control over how legacy X11 applications look when non-standard scaling factors are set.
The DE continues to default to Maximise Compatibility mode, which is what most people will want since it’s (usually) scales up legacy apps so their UI is the right size, albeit with a tradeoff in sharpness.
Since visual fidelity is often preferred there are 2 new options available in Settings > Applications > X11 Window System Application Scaling to fine-tune scaling behaviour:
- Optimise for applications
- Optimise for full-screen and gaming
The former of these may help apps that don’t support fractional scaling to look sharper against ones native to Wayland, while the latter makes apps match your screen resolution instead, thus their scaling could look different to other apps which do support fractional scaling.
Other Changes
Beyond those — and on top of everything COSMIC DE already added in earlier releases, which isn’t bullet-pointed in this article as it’s just about the Alpha 7 update — there’s also all of this:
- Tooltips added to app tray, workspaces, app library, and launcher
- System shortcut buffs, including super + + / - to zoom the UI
- Audio balance slider to Settings > Sound
- COSMIC Files adds seek ahead search & open with single click options
- COSMIC Media Player adds option to hide the title bar when mouse is idle
- COSMIC Text now supports kerning and ligature font settings
- ‘Permanently Delete’ option added to Trash context menu
- Support for EAP and PEAP network authentication
- Date applet now highlights the current day
Beyond all that, the usual assortment of bug fixes, performance tuning, code cleanups, foundational plumbing, desktop portal and protocol integrations, translation updates, UI tweak and so on.
More details on the System76 blog announcement.
Try COSMIC DE in Pop!_OS 24.04
If you want to try out the COSMIC desktop for yourself, you can – a shiny new Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha ISO has been issued, preinstalled with COSMIC Alpha 7.
Download the ISO from the System76 website, flash it to a USB, SD card, or similar to boot the distro on real hardware. Alternatively, boot it up in a virtual machine to indulge your curiosity.
In all, COSMIC Alpha 7 delivers another solid set of updates, updates those who already run Pop!_OS 24.04 Alpha will have received bit-by-bit over the past month or so.