COSMIC Alpha 5 Desktop Brings COSMIC Media Player As Default, VRR Updates

Written by Michael Larabel in Desktop on 9 January 2025 at 05:05 PM EST. 59 Comments
DESKTOP
Building off the COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

COSMIC Alpha 5 is now shipping the COSMIC Media Player as their new default media player. COSMIC Media Player supports the Vulkan API for rendering and VA-API GPU-accelerated video decoding. Here's a screenshot of the COSMIC Media Player from System76 in its current form:

COSMIC Media Player


COSMIC Alpha 5 also has improvements to Alt+Tab ordering, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) improvements, continued work on the settings area, and a variety of other fixes throughout this Rust-based desktop.

More details on the COSMIC Alpha 5 desktop release via the System76 blog.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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