COSMIC Desktop 1.0.14 released with several bug fixes and improvements

System76, the company behind PopOS and COSMIC Desktop, has released version 1.0.14 of its desktop environment, bringing keyboard shortcut support for non-Latin layouts, automated external monitor brightness adjustments, integrated VPN handling, a cursor idle-hide timeout, and more.

In the COSMIC store, the devs introduced an rpm-ostree backend to allow users of Fedora atomic desktops to perform system upgrades directly from the app manager. This backend parses native rpm-ostree terminal commands under the hood, checking for available updates with 'upgrade --check' and verifying staged files with the 'status' command so that the interface does not show redundant update prompts after queuing an install.

COSMIC 1.0.14 also ships with an improvement to the settings daemon that enables users to control their external monitor brightness levels using DDC/CI (Display Data Channel / Command Interface) protocols directly from the system settings panel. Users will notice that the settings application now requests these brightness values much more reliably from the hardware daemon after a system reboot.

Libcosmic, the custom Rust widget toolkit that serves as the System76 answer to stuff like libadwaita, received key bind support for non-Latin keyboard layouts to make shortcuts work for international users. Other changes COSMIC 1.0.14 brings include volume progress markers, alphabetized VPN connections, sorted startup applications, and proper natural scroll direction settings. The developers also fixed several notable bugs that disrupted the workflow in earlier builds:

1. A crash that occurs when a user resizes a window in an X11 environment.
2. Fullscreen X11 games opening as floating or tiled windows instead of taking up the entire screen.
3. Desktop groups that block context menu actions for internal applications.
4. Zombie shell processes that linger in the background during applet execution.
5. Wayland pipe connection failures that freeze cosmic-applets instead of allowing a graceful exit.
6. Window snapping failures where the compositor forgets the original coordinates after a user drags a window.

COSMIC is a free and open-source modern desktop environment created by System76, and the project had its first major standalone alpha release, Epoch 1, last December. System76 chose to write the DE in Rust to leverage its incredible performance and memory safety guarantees. It was created after its developers got tired of GNOME updates constantly breaking heavily customized extensions like Pop Shell that shipped with PopOS.