System76 Cosmic DE gets Nvidia improvements, myriad new features in latest pre-alpha update

It's been previously shown that the development team in charge of System76's Cosmic Desktop means business. The new desktop environment, which is now due for release near the end of September, recently received a number of updates to everything from its feature set and drivers to its bundled applications.

A recent System76 blog post details the latest additions to both Pop!_OS and the pre-alpha Cosmic Desktop. While the current version of Pop!_OS was updated to Linux kernel version 6.8.0, bringing compatibility for Intel Xe and Arc graphics and AMD Zen 5 to Pop!_OS, the updates to the Cosmic DE are more exciting.

The most noticeable change to Cosmic is the addition of cross-compatible theming. Theme changes made in Cosmic settings will now apply across GTK 3, GTK 4, and Flatpak apps, making the desktop experience far more cohesive. System76 has also introduced custom Cosmic and GTK icons that will automatically apply to Cosmic and GTK applications.

Much of the updates to the Cosmic pre-alpha are focussed on bringing the desktop environment to parity with other common DEs. One example of this is the addition of the Super+drag shortcut to move windows.

Cosmic Settings has also received a lot of love, many items previously labelled "TODO" now implemented, including keyboard settings and system profile editing. System76 also took the time to call out some valuable third-party contributions — features added by the Pop!_OS and Cosmic community simply because they wanted to see them implemented or wanted to use the features.

One such third-party contributions is a set of touchpad gestures for workspace switching, while the same developer also added dock window previews and window snapping for tiling and maximising. There's also a new third-party Tasks app for tracking to-do lists and the like.

Cosmic users on Nvidia graphics cards will also be happy to hear that System76 is implementing fixes for XWayland that reportedly should improve performance and compatibility with Nvidia GPUs. Cosmic Compositor now also uses the new linux-drm-syncobj-v1 Wayland protocol for explicit sync, which should make Wayland much more usable on Nvidia hardware after the Nvidia driver version 555 lands.

System76 also shared some preliminary performance testing, which showed the new desktop environment running on par with or ahead of Gnome on both AMD and Nvidia hardware in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p.

Cosmic appears to be coming together nicely ahead of its "end of Summer" launch window, and looks to be one of the more exciting things to happen to the Linux desktop in a while, if the discussion on r/Pop_OS is any indication. Check out the GitHub repo for instructions on how to install and test Cosmic Desktop for yourself.

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