Cosmic looking out of this world
Pop!_OS Cosmic DE is to be released as an alpha, with a new terminal and overhauled graphics support.
Denver-based System76 is renowned for selling powerful notebooks, desktop machines and servers with Linux preinstalled. Users can choose stock Ubuntu, but for the past six years, the company has also offered its very own Pop!_OS.
Based on Ubuntu, it uses its own Gnomederived desktop environment, Cosmic. In a recent blog post, System 76 announced that it’s on the “home stretch” in putting together an alpha for the latest Cosmic DE.
Special mention should go to Cosmic Terminal (cosmic-term), based on alacritty_ terminal. It features bidirectional rendering, desktop and syntax themes. It also supports GPU rendering, using glyphon and wgpu.
One use for the terminal is running Cosmicrandr, a command-line utility for listing and configuring displays in Wayland. It will also be used by Cosmic Settings’ display settings page.
The team at System76 has also been making good use of the new screenshot applet to showcase Cosmic DE. It supports both fullscreen and windows.
Cosmic DE will operate only in hybrid graphics mode. Applications will run using the dGPU (dedicated GPU) if specifically requested, but will otherwise default to using integrated graphics. The system can also turn off the dGPU to extend battery life. This feature will no doubt be put to good use to display the new ‘frosted glass’ effect, which can add blurred transparency to visual theming.
Work continues on other features, such as the Tiling applet, as well as floating window stacks and Comsic app and applet icons.
Currently, the alpha release is scheduled for the end of March. Visit https://blog.system76. com for the latest news.