COSMIC, is a desktop environment of Pop! _OS which is based on a modified GNOME Shell
System76 (the Pop!_OS Linux distribution company) recently released a report on the development of a new COSMIC user environment rewritten in Rust. The environment is being developed as a universal project that is not tied to a specific distribution and conforms to Freedesktop specifications, plus it is also developing a Wayland-based cosmic build composite server.
About the project it is mentioned that to build an interface, COSMIC uses the Iced library, which uses a modular architecture with type safety and reactive programming models, and also offers an architecture familiar to developers familiar with Elm, a declarative interface construction language.
You have to remember that System76 opted to make the change of GTK and Iced, since during the tests that were carried out several COSMIC applets were prepared, simultaneously written in GTK and Iced to compare technologies.
What's new in COSMIC?
In the recent report released as the main news item, the work carried out in the «COSMIC Panels» which muestra a list of active windows, shortcuts for to access quickly to applications and the location of the support for applets (integrated applications which run in separate processes).
By example, applets implement application menus, user interfaces, cultural, de desk, change keyboard layouts, control media playback, change the costumes, control Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, display the output of cumulative notification lists, show the number of tiempo and turn off the screen de call. It should be mentioned that it is planned to implement an applet with forecast of tiempo, notes, clipboard management and menu implementation user.
It is mentioned that the panels can be divide in sections, by example, a section top with menus and indicators and a section less with a list of active tasks and shortcuts. Partial panels can be place vertical and horizontally, occupy All el width for the screen o solo a selected area, use transparency y change el style depending on design choice clear y dark.
Another notable change is the version of the the service optimization Automatic System76 Scheduler 2.0 which allows you to dynamically adjust CFS task scheduler settings (Completely Fair Scheduler), changes the priority of execution of process for reducir the delays and maximize el performance of the process related with la window de work present of the user. It is mentioned that new support for policies such as SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_IDLE was added.
La nueva version integrates the server of Pipewire media, increasing the priority of the process display content multimedia, in addition to the archive configuration has been converted to a new format, where can define their own rules and control el use in various optimization modes. For example, mention is made of state "Power Based Configuration" applied to cgroups and parent processes, the best before date of resources in the process of the programmer principal has reduced en about 75%.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- New a ready-made configurator implementation with the new widget library.
- First version of the configurator offers settings for the panel, keyboard and desktop background.
- In the future, the number of pages with settings will be increased.
- The configurator has a modular architecture that allows you to easily connect additional pages with settings.
- Preparations are underway to integrate support for high dynamic range (HDR) displays and color controls (for example, it is planned to add support for ICC color profiles).
- Added support for output with 10 bits per channel color representation to the cosmic-comp composite server.
- The Iced GUI library is working on support tools for people with disabilities.
- An experimental integration with the AccessKit library has been carried out and the possibility of using Orca screen readers has been added.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.