Notable changes:
- Tracking improvements. For example, if you use the launcher to launch an application and then switch workspaces, it will still launch in the workspace you opened it from;
- Supported the ext-session-lock protocol, which authenticates the user and informs the compositor when the session should be unlocked
- XDG activation and DBus activation support
- work on HDR
- Ongoing work to package COSMIC on NixOS: tracking issue
I’ve been waiting for this desktop to release patiently. I can’t wait to try it. I have one question that I never got to ask anywhere, how is this going to work with the whole Qt/GTK apps? Are things going to look weird like they do on (mostly) Gnome and (sometimes) KDE Plasma?
You’ll likely need something separate that’ll style both of these through the settings, similar to how you would config GTK themes on Plasma, or vice versa. I haven’t checked if they do this on their on yet, but it’ll probably be handled this way eventually. Out of the box, expect any Qt or GTK apps to look like their Breeze and Adwaita defaults look, unless you’ve already changed this on your system
I’d love for one of their devs to announce this or make a video about how it’s going to work.
Removed by mod
Give it time
Well GTK does not have theming anymore, though it still needs some way to configure fonts and icon theme.
It technically still does if you use their theming app “Gradience”. I use it currently on my laptop. Pretty nifty little app. It still doesn’t theme the shell (the panel, the password box… etc), but it does theme even flatpaks most of the time
Iirc Gradience punches a hole in the flatpak sandbox for xdg-config/gtk-4.0, which usually is in .config. This makes it work and isn’t a security problem.
Gnome Shell is unaffected because it doesn’t use GTK.
What does it use then?
Gnome libadwaita apps only change between dark and light mode, which probably can be derived from COSMIC DE’s settings quite easily.
For Qt I’m not sure how it looks by default, but since System76 wants to support multiple toolkits anyway, I guess they’ll have a solution ready.
I truly hope so, because I’m definitely putting this DE on one of my devices.
Good job Cosmic team!
I really hope Cosmic can be the first DE to close the gap between tilling window managers and DEs we have today. Very excited for it!
