Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop 1.9 | These Massive Changes Are Seriously Impressive

Summary of Technological Concepts & Product Changes (Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop 1.9.0 and prior: 1.6.0–1.9.0)

This video is an overview of major updates to COSMIC Desktop (System76) spanning Cosmic Applets, Compositor, Files, Settings, Greeter, Launcher, OSK (on-screen keyboard), Store, and new apps. The host also demonstrates several features in-app.

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Major release: COSMIC 1.9.0 highlights

• New “Cosmic Viewer” / image viewer app

  • Supports a frosted/black full-screen viewing mode with a translucent UI overlay.
  • Provides editing/markup tools:
    • Pen, text, highlighter
    • Shapes: rectangle, ellipse, arrow, line, star, polygon
  • Notes non-destructive editing.
  • Includes editing/navigation tools:
    • Crop, rotate, zoom in/out
    • Fit-to-view
    • Full-screen controls
  • Mentions export-like workflows via the UI (e.g., move to trash, set as wallpaper, etc.).

• OSK (Cosmic OSK) improvements

  • On-screen keyboard supports touch + gamepad input.
  • Controller button mapping is described (e.g., L2/R2, ABXY-style labels, and space/enter/backspace behavior).
  • Supports blurred translucent styling and appearance options (including light vs dark modes).
  • Demonstrated integration:
    • OSK appears when focusing text fields
    • Gamepad can trigger/control OSK

• COSMIC Store revamp

  • Visual redesign:
    • Cards UI
    • Frosted-glass styling
    • Improved overall appearance
  • Shows app details such as screenshots (light/dark), description, version history, licenses, etc.
  • Example apps mentioned: Slack, Telegram, Steam Launcher, Lutris, etc.

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Compositor / touch / Wayland / UI performance changes (1.6–1.9)

• Cosmic Compositor

  • Reduced redraws and improved context menu + input field behavior.
  • Fixes “infinite dialog boxes” tied to network mount failures.
  • Touch screen support improvements mentioned in Cosmic Epoch 1.8.0, including additional required changes for COSMIC apps.
  • Updated layer-shell behavior so background and OSK can appear on the lock screen, important for controller/handheld scenarios.
  • Cursor behavior:
    • Adds/adjusts cursor magnification on shake (similar concept to KDE Plasma/macOS).
    • Notes a potential issue: cursor may become blurry at very large sizes (host observation after updating).
  • Game/graphics improvements:
    • Fixes sluggish Steam overlays by ensuring X11 frame callbacks continue working.

• XDG desktop portal

  • Prevents “panic” when a low-level Wayland error occurs—handled/ignored rather than crashing.

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App-level feature updates

Cosmic Files (file manager)

• Network/storage usability

  • “Open with” dialog can search for applications.
  • Can navigate to network locations from any location.
  • “Add network drive” supports multiple protocols:
    • AppleTalk, FTP, NFS, SMB, SSH, WebDAV
  • Performance improvement for network file system browsing.

• UI/UX fixes

  • Rename sidebar favorites.
  • Fix alignment issues in grid view filenames.
  • Fix drag-selection rectangle not redrawing.
  • Prevent tab switching unless the current tab is closed.

Cosmic Greeter (login screen)

• More resilient login:
  • Login continues when PAM returns non-fatal errors.
• More OSK integration:
  • Optional systemd-homed support mentioned.
  • On-screen keyboard toggle available from the greeter.

Cosmic Settings / Settings Daemon

• Stability and correct behavior

  • Fix panic on invalid brightness value (e.g., “-1 max brightness”).
  • Fix refresh rate reset when a monitor is removed.
  • Fix low-battery alerts when the system has no battery.
  • Fix monitor brightness lagging via AC-power input checks (Cosmic Settings Daemon).

• UX options

  • Cursor magnification on shake: enable/disable.
  • Bluetooth UI improvements:
    • Adds back navigation on Bluetooth page when multiple adapters exist.
  • Font settings:
    • Settings daemon updates to synchronize font settings for GNOME applications.

Cosmic App Library / Applets

• Fixes pixelated icons.
• Context menu + search box fixes.
• Cosmic Applets:
  • Adds an on-screen keyboard applet for OSK toggling.
  • Fixes applet panics triggered by audio source/panic-related conditions.

Cosmic Term (terminal)

• Terminal UI customization:
  • Configure terminal borders
  • Handle subpixel coordinate rounding
• Redraw fixes for context menus/input fields.
• Escape/menu behavior:
  • Fix escape key not closing menus.

Cosmic Launcher / Panel / Session / Monitor / Notifications / Edit / Player

• Launcher

  • Fix pixelated icons and text input context menu behavior.

• Panel

  • Configurable border thickness.
  • Fixes wheel/protocol errors when applets create layer-shell surfaces.

• Session

  • Sets COSMIC version variable.
  • Fixes startup/autostart issues (including OSK behavior with auto-login and systemd variations).

• Monitor dashboard

  • Dashboard layout improvements (graphs placement above top apps/processes).

• Notifications

  • When Do Not Disturb is enabled, hides visible notifications.

• Cosmic Edit

  • Prevents invalid cut/copy actions.
  • Improves escaping/menu closure behavior.

• Cosmic Player

  • Fix invalid frame rate handling for some files.

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Wallpaper changes (cosmetic but highlighted)

• New wallpapers introduced.
• Host demonstrates wallpaper features, including:
  • Setting different wallpapers per display (e.g., secondary virtual monitor vs laptop screen)
  • Merging wallpapers across displays into one
• Mentions Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, using themed intro thumbnail/wallpaper.

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Main speakers / sources

• Primary speaker: The video host/reviewer (unnamed in subtitles), discussing COSMIC 1.6.0 → 1.9.0 features and demos.
• Primary software/project source: System76 / Pop!_OS COSMIC (COSMIC desktop components: Compositor, Files, Settings, Greeter, Store, OSK, etc.).