As we near the stable release of System76's COSMIC desktop environment, the project has reached another milestone with the launch of Alpha 7. If you are familiar with Pop!_OS, you might be wondering why System76 chose to abandon GNOME for COSMIC. To put it simply, trying to build the desktop experience System76 wanted on top of GNOME using extensions became a real headache. System76 had created popular features like its automatic window tiling (Pop Shell) using these extensions, but they were notoriously fragile and would frequently break whenever GNOME updated.
This constant breakage made it a tough job for System76 to keep Pop!_OS stable and consistent for its users. On top of the technical pain points, System76 also had a different vision for the desktop. It wanted to create a highly functional and customizable environment aimed specifically at creators and developers, which did not always line up with the direction GNOME was taking with its design philosophy.
Building COSMIC from the ground up in Rust was System76's way of taking complete control, ensuring stability, and crafting the exact desktop experience it believed its users needed, free from the constraints and breakages encountered when building on top of GNOME.
This latest Alpha 7 release brings a host of new features and improvements. Workspaces receive notable attention; you can now move them by clicking and dragging, and a new pinning feature allows you to keep a fixed number of workspaces open regardless of whether they contain windows.
Accessibility features are a key focus in Alpha 7. Four new options have been added: High Contrast Mode, Color Filters (for various types of colorblindness, plus grayscale), Color Inversion, and Mono Sound, which combines stereo channels for users with hearing loss. Improvements have also been made to the Magnifier tool, allowing the overlay and Super + Scroll functionality to be disabled and improving movement when following the pointer.
To make navigating the desktop easier, tooltips now appear when hovering over items in the app tray, workspaces overview, app library, and launcher, helping you quickly identify applications and features. Global shortcuts for applications, useful for things like push-to-talk, have also been introduced. However, they are off by default for privacy and currently rely on detecting specific key combinations, with future support for a more modern portal planned.
The handling of XWayland applications, which are X11 apps running within the Wayland environment, sees new fractional scaling optimizations. Display settings now offer "Optimize for applications" to ensure non-scaling apps appear crisp, and "Optimize for fullscreen/gaming" to match the screen resolution, giving you more control over how older applications are displayed.
Keyboard shortcuts have been refined for a more intuitive experience. When moving focus or windows using Super + Arrows, the desktop now prioritizes moving through workspaces on the current display before switching to another display. You can now also cycle back from the last workspace to the first and vice versa. Navigating to the next or previous display now uses Super + Shift + Arrows, while switching focus uses Alt + Super + Arrows, and moving a window uses Shift + Alt + Super + Arrows. Additionally, Super + and Super - can now be used for desktop zoom.
The built-in file manager, COSMIC Files, gains a seek-ahead search option. By typing the first letter of a file or folder, the location bar fills in the path and offers autocomplete suggestions, speeding up navigation.
Sound Settings now include a Left-Right balance scale, allowing you to adjust the stereo balance for your audio output.
As with any alpha release, numerous bugs have been squashed, and performance has improved. System76 reports significant reductions in CPU usage in various areas, including cosmic-comp, Bluetooth handling, and app resizing. Support has been added for additional Wayland protocols (ext-workspace-v1, ext-image-capture-v1, cosmic-workspace-v2), and many fixes have been implemented for COSMIC Files related to deleted favorites, renaming, trash handling, and navigation. Networking sees fixes for VPN configuration and support for EAP and PEAP authentication. Memory leak patches have been expanded, and many smaller UI and functionality glitches across the desktop have been addressed.
System76 has stated the intention is to move to a beta phase soon, which was previously anticipated around January/February 2025, followed by a stable release later in the year.
Since COSMIC is simply a desktop environment, you can try it on non-Pop!_OS distributions like the recently released Fedora 42 Beta. System76 also offers COSMIC Epoch 1 (alpha 7) on the Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS alpha. Grab the ISO here (Intel/AMD | NVIDIA).
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