COSMIC Desktop Rolls Out Lock/Login Screen, More Wayland Protocols

System76 engineers working on their COSMIC desktop environment for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution continue to be quite busy working on this Rust-written desktop code.

October has been another busy month for System76 software developers in presumably aiming to have the COSMIC desktop in good shape for their Pop!_OS 24.04 release next year. The past few weeks has brought support for additional Wayland protocols, the lock and login screens coming together, continued appearance/UI work, and much more. Here are some of the October highlights that were just shared by System76.

- COSMIC's new lock and login screens have been completed.

- An initial design of the COSMIC Appearance Settings has landed for switching between light and dark modes and allowing color customization.

- Any theme changes are now immediately visible.

- Early design work around per-workspace tiling.

- Support for modifier-only key bindings.

- Support for the Wayland pointer constraints protocol.

- DMA-BUF screen capture support for benefiting tools like OBS Studio for more efficient screen capturing.

- DRM lease support for virtual reality (VR) devices.

- Continued UI work and polishing.

More details on these latest COSMIC features via the System76 blog.