System76 desktop environment COSMIC alpha now available to try

System76 have today released the first alpha preview for you to try out COSMIC, their brand new home-grown desktop environment. Built with Rust, it should hopefully feel pretty familiar to most Linux users with a visual style that matches up to their current GNOME-based desktop.

While they’re building it for their own Pop!_OS, with a alpha iso for Pop, it’s designed to be cross-distro and they even have ways for you to test it out directly on a few other distributions already.

Pictured – COSMIC Alpha 1 using automatic tiling for opened windows

Their vision for COSMIC: “COSMIC began as our answer to user feedback we’ve received on improving Pop!_OS. The new desktop environment introduces a custom theming system, streamlined Auto-tiling, new core applications including an app store, and provides you more control over your workflow. Written in the Rust programming language, COSMIC is more stable, more secure, and better optimized for performance.”

Keep in mind this is the first alpha build, there will likely be many bugs and unfinished features. Going by the press details they sent this is what’s currently complete:

• Settings pages + applets for daily use for most users
  • Applets provide many settings needs
    • Connecting to bluetooth and wireless networks. Choosing audio input and output devices
  • Highlight COSMIC’s unique features
    • Panel and Dock Customization
    • Appearance and Themes
• OS Interfaces
  • Panels, Launcher, App Library, Greeter, Dialogs
• Apps
  • Settings, Files, Text Editor, Store, Terminal
• Compositor features
  • Auto-Tiling, Snapping (Manual-Tiling), Stacking, and Sticky Windows
  • Excellent nvidia hybrid graphics support
  • Fractional scaling
  • Wayland native with XWayland support

And this is what’s still to be done:

• Numerous Settings pages
• Frosted effect for OS interfaces
• Variable refresh rate
• Accessibility
• Initial Setup
  • Need to set time manually
• Workspaces features, animations, and refinement
• Lots of COSMIC Files work
• Bug fixes and refinement
• Compositor software rendering
  • Testing in VMs requires hardware acceleration
  • GNOME Boxes uses software acceleration but it’s pretty smooth
  • VirtualBox requires enabling VT-x/AMD-V and Enable Nested Paging

Check it out on the official website.

A promising start to what could be a really interesting Linux desktop environment, although as expected it is on the rough side being in alpha right now you can clearly see where they’re going with it. I can imagine this becoming really popular.

When you’ve tried it be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.