System76 Making Progress With COSMIC Desktop - 10-bit Color Support Added, HDR Plans

The folks at System76 have published a new blog post that summarizes their software progress over the course of April on further advancing their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment.

In addition to all of their Linux hardware efforts, System76 has been investing big in COSMIC as their new desktop environment that will power future Pop!_OS Linux distribution releases. Over the course of April some of their software development efforts included:

- Progress on COSMIC Panels as similar to the desktop's top bar and dock but with increased versatility. The post notes, "COSMIC Panels are central to the COSMIC DE ethos. While COSMIC will be the flagship experience on Pop!_OS, it's designed to be useful for people, distros, companies, and organizations to create and offer their own unique user experience."

- A COSMIC Settings area is now under construction for handling various desktop settings, keyboard input, wallpaper settings, and more.

- System76 participated in the recent Red Hat HDR hackfest. System76 does plan to support HDR within COSMIC.

- 10-bit color support was added to the COSMIC compositor as a step toward HDR requirements.

- Working on AccessKit accessibility for the Iced Rust GUI library to enhance screenreader support and accessibility for the COSMIC desktop.

- System76 Scheduler 2.0 was released in April as another software step forward from the company. (System76 Scheduler 2.0.1 came out last week as well.)

See the system76.com blog post for more details on their COSMIC efforts.