The System76 team has released COSMIC 1.0.4, a maintenance update that fixes a number of issues across the entire desktop, from the COSMIC greeter to the file manager and applets.
Starting with the greeter, the system now logs you in immediately after a successful fingerprint scan, eliminating the need to click a confirm button to actually log in. COSMIC Files no longer crashes when trying to copy large directories and is now significantly faster when copying files. Before this update, some reported that copying a tiny 14 MB directory with about a thousand files to an external drive took over 30 seconds.
Cosmic Edit now handles large files without eating all your system"s memory. Before, opening a file with hundreds of thousands of lines could cause a crash because the editor attempted to load the entire document into memory at once.
Other changes include a fix for visual artifacts that could appear in the overview mode and corrected behavior when using super+click on a tiled window. The update also improves the logic for setting the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable, addressing a long-standing issue for NixOS users.
COSMIC, in case you are unaware, is now the official desktop environment for Pop!_OS. System76 has been developing it for the last few years, with the desktop officially launching as part of the Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS release last month.
Previous versions of Pop!_OS used GNOME as the base, but System76 added a lot of its own extensions and modifications on top. This became a maintenance nightmare, as GNOME updates would frequently break the extensions, forcing the dev team to patch and rewrite its work constantly.
Disagreements with GNOME"s design philosophy and the unsustainable development cycle were a bad combination, leading the team to start working on a whole new desktop built from scratch in Rust. This includes a suite of its own core applications, like a file manager, terminal, and app store.