Closing in on a COSMIC Alpha
-
System76 ☛ Closing in on a COSMIC Alpha
We’re on approach towards an alpha version of the new COSMIC desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other distros. Meanwhile, COSMIC testing has expanded to more users around the office. This month, we’re providing updates to the checklist we published in January on remaining tasks for releasing the alpha.
-
Unicorn Media ☛ System76 Says Cosmic Desktop’s Alpha Release Is Almost Here
System76 told the world that they were working on a new version of their Cosmic desktop a little over two years ago, and since then they’ve released tidbits here and there on how that work is going. Now they say it’s just about ready, and in a blog posted on Valentine’s day, the Denver-based computer maker says the countdown for the alpha release is well underway.
If you don’t know, the new Cosmic will be a made-from-scratch desktop environment, written in Rust using System76’s own iced-based libcosmic toolkit, that will eventually become the default DE in Pop!_OS, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that’s installed by default on System76 computers. Its arrival has been anticipated by a lot of Linux users, including me, mainly because of the reputation the hardware maker earned from its work on Pop!_OS, but more specifically, the work it’s already done fine tuning the Gnome desktop to make it more than…well, Gnome.
When Pop! was first released, the distribution used a highly modified version of Gnome as its DE, which eventually led to the creation of a new Gnome-based desktop called Cosmic that modified the Gnome user experience with features such as an added custom dock, shortcut controls, and other changes, which premiered in Pop!_OS 21.04, and was well received by both users and the Linux press.