System76 has released COSMIC Desktop 1.4, the latest update to its Rust-based desktop environment. The most visible changes relate to the COSMIC System Monitor, which can now quit applications normally or force them to close when they stop responding.
The application also gains switchable CPU and GPU graph types, updated visuals, and the ability to collect and display GPU frequency information.
COSMIC’s compositor received several important fixes as well. Some games that previously failed to enter fullscreen mode should now behave correctly, while flickering when moving between menus in tiled COSMIC applications has been addressed.
Moreover, the update improves pointer accuracy near screen edges when fractional scaling is enabled and fixes inconsistent window border widths under fractional scaling. Additionally, input management for cropped tiled windows has been corrected, along with an issue involving frozen or detached active-window indicators.
COSMIC Files now falls back to GIO when it cannot open a destination during an MTP copy operation, which should make transfers to phones and other portable devices more reliable. The file manager also includes a fix for detecting trash directories.
Another major desktop component, COSMIC Launcher, now resets its results list when the search query changes. COSMIC Panel fixes two crashes, including one that could occur after changing a display’s scaling level, while COSMIC Settings resolves a problem where changing a source volume could accidentally affect an output device instead.
Users can also configure the amount by which the volume changes with each key press through a new volume-step setting inside COSMIC Settings Daemon.
It’s also worth noting that the release adds a new sound theme for distribution packaging. System76 says it will eventually become the default one because the repository containing the older Pop sound theme has been deprecated.
Finally, COSMIC Desktop 1.4 additionally updates its desktop portal to run as a system service, log through tracing and journald, and terminate cleanly if its Wayland thread crashes.
For additional details, refer to the changelog.
COSMIC Desktop 1.4 packages are expected to arrive in the repositories of rolling-release distros such as Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CachyOS, and others shortly. Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS users already have it available as an update.
