System76's COSMIC Alpha 5 is here with a new media player, VRR improvements and lots of fixes

Hardware vendor System76 continue building up their new Linux desktop environment, COSMIC, with a fifth alpha now available for testing. Their Rust-based desktop environment is primarily being made for their own Linux distribution Pop!_OS, but with proper support for users on other distributions too.

The first big addition is the new COSMIC Media Player that's now the default, which uses Vulkan for rendering and VAAPI for decoding (where available) for efficient video playback. Cycling through apps via Alt+Tab will go through in the order they were last active, there's improvements to Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), a new User Settings page and you can open links in the COSMIC Terminal.

Pictured - COSMIC Alpha 5: showing user settings, video player and Firefox.

Various other improvements include:

• New files can now be saved to a new folder.
• Ability to rename files using file search.
• Show Hidden Files toggle no longer resets after selecting Show Details.
• The calendar applet now reflects time zone changes.
• Added libnvidia-egl-wayland1 to prevent Steam hanging and XWayland performance.
• Support for Linux kernel 6.12.
• Lots of bug fixes.

More info in their blog post.