System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements To Its COSMIC DE

In addition to new hardware from Colorado-based Linux laptop/desktop retailer System76, this year we can look forward to more work on their COSMIC desktop environment being developed as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Already for kicking off 2023 they have made a number of strides in their COSMIC DE development.

System76 published a new blog post today outlining some of the features being worked on recently for COSMIC DE, their desktop written in the Rust programming language and making use of the Iced toolkit.

System76 showing off recent work on COSMIC DE.

Some of the recent work on COSMIC includes:

- UI support has been added for tabs and segmented buttons.

- Improvements to COSMIC's Settings app from search enhancements to working on the Power, Sound, and Displays functionality.

- Dynamic rendering support for the COSMIC DE with Iced-Dynrend depending upon whether there is hardware rendering support or falling back to software-based rendering with the Iced toolkit.

- XWayland support has been added to COSMIC's Compositor (cosmic-comp) for now allowing Firefox, Steam, and other X11 software to work on COSMIC DE.

More details on the latest accomplishments around System76's COSMIC DE can be found via this blog post.