COSMIC Desktop 1.1 Released with New System Monitor App

System76 has released COSMIC Desktop 1.1, the latest update to its Rust-based desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other Linux distributions.

The primary addition in this release is COSMIC Monitor, now included in the official COSMIC Desktop suite. System76 states that Pop!_OS will soon replace GNOME System Monitor with COSMIC Monitor, making it the default system monitoring app.

This release also features a new versioning approach. System76 will increment the minor version regularly, enabling mid-release patch updates as needed.

In addition to the new monitor app, COSMIC Desktop 1.1 includes translation and dependency updates across multiple components. Applets now use the cosmic-settings-daemon varlink API in the sound applet, feature improved popup anchoring in the audio applet, and resolve minimize animation stuttering.

The compositor received major updates, including tiling exceptions, named pinned workspaces, support for the pointer-warp-v1 Wayland protocol, and improved ordering for sticky and fullscreen windows.

Several crash fixes were implemented, notably addressing gradual slowdown in long-running sessions, as well as issues with monitor wake-up, window stacking, unminimizing, and activation requests without active outputs.

COSMIC Files introduces usability improvements, including sort icons replacing Unicode arrows, enhanced MIME app handling, clearing hover highlights during keyboard navigation, and support for Page Up and Page Down. COSMIC Edit now supports empty files without extensions through the application/x-zerosize MIME association.

Other components received updates as well. COSMIC Background now supports recursive scanning of custom wallpaper directories, COSMIC Icons adds more MIME type icons, and COSMIC OSD resolves an issue where the on-screen display did not appear when input and output volumes matched.

The COSMIC Panel includes fixes for fractional scaling, overflow flicker, panel color override handling, and refresh rate fallback. COSMIC Settings now uses the cosmic-settings-daemon varlink API, improves OpenVPN import handling, and sets text editor associations for empty files.

Finally, COSMIC Terminal now avoids re-reading the system theme from disk on every menu bar render, improving performance, and the COSMIC desktop portal received CI enhancements and improved output arrangement in the screencast dialog.

For additional details, see the changelog.

COSMIC Desktop 1.1 packages are expected to arrive in the repositories of rolling-release distros such as Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CachyOS, and others shortly.