System76 has released COSMIC Desktop 1.6, the latest update to its Rust-based desktop environment.
A noticeable change deals with Chromium-based applications, which have a tendency to malfunction when the display scaling is set below 100%. To address this, the COSMIC compositor has now included a workaround that improves how Chromium and Electron applications function under less common scaling settings.
The compositor has also received several stability enhancements. Specifically, a deadlock involving D-Bus in the accessibility keyboard monitor has been fixed, correct behavior has been ensured when X11 windows regain focus after having been unmapped and then remapped again, and a crash is avoided in the case of a failure during renderer creation after a GPU reset.
COSMIC Panel addresses the problem of excessive CPU usage which might occur when the screen is locked. Furthermore, it includes a number of corrections relating to touch input, improving the reliability of panel interaction on devices with touchscreens.
Frosted-glass effects are now rendered properly on panels that are attached to external monitors that have been connected recently, and this release also remedies the flickering that might have occurred when the effect was used together with the option to retain panel styling when a window is maximized.
Moreover, the panel pop-ups are now closed on all active displays prior to a new output being added, which stops interface elements from being left in an inconsistent state when a monitor is hot-plugged.
COSMIC Settings has included a number of enhancements to wallpaper management. Nowadays, users are able to select and add more than one wallpaper image at a time, and the maximum number of wallpapers available has been raised from 100 to 500.
The slider handles have been improved as well, resolving a rounding problem which might have caused a one-pixel gap between adjacent screens in multi-monitor setups. Furthermore, the networking settings no longer save VPN usernames as secrets, thus separating standard account information from the actual authentication credentials.
The COSMIC Terminal now includes borders that can be configured when there are multiple terminal panes, enabling users to make the divisions between the sessions that are displayed at the same time more or less noticeable.
Finally, the ability to carry out metadata-based cursor capture when screen casting has also been added to the COSMIC desktop portal.
For additional details, refer to the changelog.
COSMIC Desktop 1.5 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.
