System76's COSMIC Working On Drag & Drop, More Compositor Improvements

System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year.

The developers are busy inching toward the COSMIC desktop's alpha release. Some of the items accomplished the past few weeks for COSMIC include:

- Theming support has been added for apps built with GTK3 / GTK4 as well as apps packaged in Flatpak.

- Custom icon themes have been implemented that work for both COSMIC and GTK applications.

- System76 continues working on a new app store for COSMIC with all the usual free "app store" features.

- COSMIC Settings have added a Keyboard Settings page, the device name is now editable, and other settings additions.

- On-Screen Displays (OSDs) have been added for brightness, volume, and airplane mode.

- The COSMIC compositor has seen fixes for XWayland and separately a number of NVIDIA fixes. The COSMIC compositor also now has more reliable screen capture, touchscreen improvements, touch-based drag/resize windows, and other enhancements.

- COSMIC applets can now be compiled as a multi-call binary for better performance and reduced disk uage.

- Drag and drop support across Iced, libcomisc, and COSMIC Files.

More details on the April enhancements to COSMIC via the System76 blog.