COSMIC Desktop Very Close To Alpha Release, Adds Compositor Multi-Threading

System76 continues working vigorously on COSMIC, their Rust-written Linux desktop environment being written for Pop!_OS and to see availability on other Linux distributions as well. They are finishing up last minute changes before putting the flag on a COSMIC alpha release.

System76 began their latest status update by noting there are around 20 issues to be resolved before issuing the COSMIC alpha release. The hope remains that the COSMIC alpha version will be out before the end of July. Meanwhile some of the latest COSMIC changes include:

- Support for styling inactive windows differently than the rest with "inactive colors" attribute.

- COSMIC's Input Settings has seen completed support for customizable shortcuts.

- Super + Tab (or Alt + Tab) has been implemented for switching windows.

- COSMIC Display Settings now allows for enabling display mirroring.

- The panel overflow menu is being finished up for when there are too many apps/applets on a panel.

- Various fixes for gaming issues.

- Better performance for COSMIC Settings.

- Compositor multi-threading by having cosmic-comp use multiple threads that can be particularly helpful for high refresh rate displays and multi-monitor setups.

- Bug fixes for multi-GPU systems.

More details on these changes via the System76 blog.