System76 Stuffing More Features Into COSMIC Desktop Ahead Of The Holidays

The crew at System76 published a US Thanksgiving themed status update to their work on the open-source, Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment that will soon be powering their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

The COSMIC desktop continues making very nice progress as a modern, Wayland-based desktop to power their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS platform. It will be very interesting to see how far they have polished this new desktop up by the time of their Pop!_OS 24.04 release next year.

In today's November update on the desktop side, they shared the following progress:

- When new windows are opened within the COSMIC desktop, each new window will open near the center of the screen and offset by one or multiple units from the previous window. The intent is to provide easy access to the windows while keeping each window's header visible.

- The COSMIC Text Editor has been adding features like window tabs, Vim-style editing and shortcuts, syntax highlighting, and other features.

- MPRIS audio support has been added to the COSMIC audio applet.

- COSMIC's workspaces code has been refactored.

- The COSMIC compositor has added custom theming support, tracking improvements, IME support, Wayland ext-session-lock protocol support, and restart capabilities for the compositor and session.

- Security context support has been added so that certain applications can have special system privileges.

- Preparations toward eventually allowing HDR support on the COSMIC desktop, following in the foot-steps of the KDE work.

More details on this work over on the System76 blog.