System76 continue building up their desktop environment COSMIC, with a 7th Alpha release now available for testing built on top of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS alpha.
Even though I'm firmly happy with the latest KDE Plasma, because it does everything I need, I'm still quite keen to see the finished product when it comes to COSMIC as they're doing some pretty interesting stuff with it.
Pictured - COSMIC Alpha 7
In the latest release they've tweaked Workspaces so you can click and drag them around and you can pin them to ensure they stick around even when empty too. There's also various new accessibility features they've highlighted:
- High Contrast Mode uses a high-contrast theme affecting various elements for easier visibility — calculated automatically by COSMIC’s theming system using a specialized method.
- Color Filters add a filter to address common forms of colorblindness: Deuteranopia, Protanopia, and Tritanopia. For those with sensitive eyesight, a grayscale filter is also available.
- Color Inversion changes theme colors using a different calculation for the purpose of helping those affected by colorblindness differentiate between like colors.
- Mono Sound aids those with hearing loss by combining left-right sound channels into a single channel for both ears. We plan to add more accessibility features to COSMIC in future releases!
There's also improvements to the magnifier, global shortcuts for applications even when they're not in focus, improved fractional scaling for XWayland, there's a new seek ahead search option for their file manager, new sound settings and lots of bug fixes.
See more in their blog post.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
R Daneel Olivaw 4 hours ago
Minux 3 hours ago
The desktop has been pretty solid base to me for months. Maybe a bug or two sometimes. But I read this year is the year of Cosmic. And to me it's definitely. I'd wish my capacity right now gave me more chances to learn in order to put my little grain of salt.
Cosmic has made me finally feel at home on a computer.
There's just some annoying things I'd love to be able to help polish, but I'll wait because I love these guys, their philosophy, their work.
System76Last edited by Minux on 25 Apr 2025 at 3:47 pm UTC
walther von stolzing 2 hours ago
The documentation for it has been improving (there's a really nice in-progress guide book; in addition to some outdated/deprecated cookbook type manuals), and there's a pretty wide variety of example applications, but especially with respect to widgets interfacing with external data, the examples are pretty limited to simple things, which really don't help with the intricacies of Rust's borrow, lifetime, etc. rules.
Earlier this year I worked through rustlings, and a few other Rust tutorials; I was under no illusions about my competence (?!) in rust, though nevertheless I was looking forward to building a new version of my simple pdf viewer using iced. (currently a version exists that uses bare opengl, in C, via glfw) It started out fine, and I was even proud of myself when I figured out how to add a function to mupdf's rust bindings to request some extra stuff from the C side -- but then I couldn't figure out how to load rasterized pages progressively into a widget, so I gave up. Granted, I'm just a silly amateur; though various forums show real programmers getting puzzled over similar tasks.
So anyway, I hope we eventually have resources to help app developers make better use of iced.
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