Chocks away —British saying, don’t stare at me weirdly— as the second alpha of System76’s homegrown COSMIC desktop environment has been released.
To make it easy for us all to try out the latest improvements a second alpha build of Pop!_OS 24.04 is also available to download.
Those who installed the first Pop!_OS 24.04 alpha don’t need to re-install. All of the improvements in this post are available as software updates via the COSMIC App Store.
Not that anyone needs to use Pop!_OS to try the COSMIC. This Rust-based DE is also available to test on a wide range of Linux distributions, including Fedora, NixOS, Arch, and Redox OS.
System76 chose to craft its own, brand-new desktop environment to replace GNOME Shell and the myriad of GNOME Shell extensions Pop!_OS was relying on to curate its unique user experience.
The COSMIC desktop environment is built using a novel stack of technologies, including Rust and Iced; customisation, theming, and configuration are core pillars; a bespoke suite of core apps are included; and the DE is designed to work as well on other distro as on Pop!_OS.
While COSMIC is not yet feature complete, it already presents a compelling alternative to established Linux desktop environment.
What’s new in COSMIC Alpha 2?
For COSMIC Alpha 2 System76 say it added “…more Settings pages, the bulk of functionality for COSMIC Files, highly requested window management features, and considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support, as well as some notable bug fixes.”
Chances are you want specifics, right?
Versus the first alpha of COSMIC DE the Settings app in Alpha 2 offers:
- New Power page: power mode options, Bluetooth device battery levels
- New Network settings: wired connections, wi-fi networks, VPN setup
- New Sound settings: sound profiles, volumes sliders, bluez5 support
- New Bluetooth settings page: connect/disconnect/forget devices
- Appearance page adds Comfortable/Compact/Spacious density options
- Date & Time page adds toggle to show seconds in clock applet
- Displays page adds X11 scaling settings
- Window Management adds Focus follows cursor/cursor follows focus options
Substantial new features added to COSMIC Files app include:
- New header bar options: new folder, grid/list view, sort by
- Sorting files by Name, Type, Last modified, Date created, or Size
- New Recents shortcut in the sidebar
- Fully-stocked File menu with essential actions
- Archive compression/extraction (tar/tbz/tgz/txz/zip)
- Browse and connect to network drives
- New
ctrl+dshortcut to add selected item to sidebar - New
ctrl+,shortcut to access COSMIC Files settings
Also of note, Files has a preview feature you can activate by pressing space with a file selected.File previews are experimental and can’t be disabled in alpha 2. This makes it easier to preview a file (e.g.m see more details) in a side panel.
For image files a ‘gallery’ mode option lets you page through all images in the current folder, saving the need to open them in an image viewer.
Elsewhere:
- Faster startup times for COSMIC Store
- Assorted applet improvements
- Libcomsic rebased on iced 0.13
- Improved fractional scaling for games in Steam
- COSMIC Greeter localised
- Various UI tweaks/finesse/fixes
And a shed-load of bug fixes, including issues affecting apps now opening after being closed, unreliable clipboard behaviour, external monitor freezing, and workspace touchpad gestures
Being an alpha it remains a work in progress and not reliable enough for daily driver usage by most people, though the basics are plumbed in so it’s perfectly ‘habitable’, so to speak!
Go grab the new ISO if you’re interested in trying this out. It’s a regular ISO you can ‘live boot’ from to see if you like what System76 is doing and, if you do, install it on your device (which ideally isn’t your main machine since, y’know, it’s an alpha build).
System76 say a new alpha of COMSIC DE will now appear each month until “all core features have been built out”, meaning we can expect plenty more improvements soon!