COSMIC releases second alpha, adds configuration panels, support improvements, and more

COSMIC Alfa 2 is renewed with new settings and customization options. Adjust windows and connect Bluetooth devices

It was just Last month when System76 announced the release of the first alpha from the desktop environment «COSMIC» written in Rust and has been working on it for the last 3 years (first it was based on GNOME and later it was moved to RUST).

The novelties that stood out from the first alpha These were automatic window tiling, the “Customizable Panel” with active windows, shortcuts for applications and applets, as well as the stackable window pinning mode.

Related article:

The first alpha of the COSMIC desktop environment is presented 

What's new in COSMIC Alpha 2

In this second alpha version that is presented from the environment, have been introduced Several important changes in the configurator, expanding the customization and control options of the system. And it is that in the configuration panel Various modules and new options have been added:

• New sound module allowing Select audio devices, adjust volume, and assign audio profiles, including support for Bluetooth devices.
• Added module “Power and Battery,” which offers power consumption modes power levels such as “minimum power consumption”, “maximum performance” and “balanced mode”, as well as showing the charge levels of connected wireless devices such as mice or headsets.
• In the networks section, the new The “Network and Wireless” module makes it easy to manage connections wired, wireless and VPN, showing their status.
• With regards to screen, was added the ability to scale X11 application output, with the caveat that image quality may vary depending on screen resolution.
• In the configuration of the date and time, has been added a switch to display seconds on the system clock.
• As for the awindow management, modes have been introduced to adjust focus behavior: one follows the cursor and the other moves the focus with keyboard shortcuts or when opening new windows. A switch was also added to disable actions associated with the Super key. These changes make COSMIC more flexible and adaptable to different usage styles and user preferences.
• In the CAppearance Settings from COSMIC, the option to select the density of the layout of the interface elements, offering three modes: comfortable, compact, and deep indents. These modes affect the size of headings and the space between list items and subprograms.
• Has been added a new configuration panel for Bluetooth, allowing you to easily pair, connect and disconnect devices.

Another novelty is a button in the context menu which allows you to obtain a vPreview files before opening them. A mode for viewing a list of recently used files with the option to preview them has been implemented in the sidebar. Gallery mode has also been added, which turns the file manager into an image viewer, allowing you to view the contents of a selected directory sequentially.

El file manager also received improvements, since Now features a search bar, buttons to create new directories, and options to switch between display modes (list or icon grid) and sorting. In addition, It is possible to sort files by name, type, date modified, date created, and size. A shortcut (Ctrl+) has been added for quick access to settings, and the sidebar has been reorganized, with separators between the Recycle Bin, Network Storage, and Additional Drives.

In addition to this, the file manager now supports network storage and has added buttons to compress and extract files in .tar, .tbz, .tgz, .txz and .zip formats, in the “File” menu. In addition, the initial loading of the COSMIC Store application store has been significantly accelerated.

Of the other changes that stand out:

• The Power Management applet now allows you to set charging thresholds for the batteries, determining when they should start or stop.
• Text rendering has been optimized and reliability has been increased when using non-integer scale values ​​in games running Proton.
• Libcosmic has been updated to version iced or 0.13, along with improvements to Winit and sctk.
• Fixed crashes with X11/XWayland applications in fullscreen, improved fractional scaling in games using Proton, and optimized text rendering.
• In terms of accessibility, improvements have been added for screen reader compatibility via atspi.
• system-config-printer has been included in the COSMIC session and Pop wallpapers have been replaced with COSMIC ones.

Finally If you are interested in trying this desktop environment, you should know that two ISO images of Pop!_OS with COSMIC are offered, for systems with NVIDIA GPU NVIDIA GPU (3 GB) and Intel/AMD ( 2.5 GB) built on the basis of a test version of the Pop!_OS 24.04 distribution.

As for packages for other distributions, you can refer to the installation instructions below. offered at this link.

Interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.