System76’s COSMIC Desktop Planning Vulkan Renderer, Improved Gaming Experience

Following December’s release of COSMIC Epoch 1 along with the Pop!_OS 24.04 release by System76, today they shared more of their feature plans for the next two major COSMIC desktop updates.

System76 still has some pretty grand plans for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment. While since the big inaugural release there have been some point releases to help polish it, for COSMIC Epoch 2 and then Epoch 3 are some pretty significant features planned. A Vulkan renderer for the COSMIC Wayland compositor will hopefully make it into the next release plus some exciting performance work and more. In a blog post today System76 shared some of their action items.

COSMIC Epoch 2 action items include:

– Performance optimizations such as reactive rendering to significantly reduce CPU usage (60~80%) as well as multi-threaded image decoding and parallel GPU image uploads.

– Window drop shadows for libcosmic.

– Applet Settings

– A Vulkan renderer for the COSMIC compositor. This Vulkan renderer is motivated in part for HDR and night light features.

– Improvements to enhance the gaming experience.

– A blur/frosted glass effect for windows with COSMIC compositor.

– Wacom tablet support.

Meanwhile some of the features for COSMIC Epoch 3 include:

– A COSMIC Greeter for the desktop.

– Various workspace animations.

– HDR and Night Light support for the COSMIC compositor.

– Gamepad/controller support work.

– The ability to restore sessions to retain window sizes and locations during the same login.

– SVG cursor support.

– Hotloading applets for the COSMIC panel.

– COSMIC Settings is to add per-app volume controls.

– For the COSMIC Edit editor to have language server protocol (LSP) support, spell checking, splits, and other features.

More details on these planned improvements for the next two major releases of the COSMIC desktop via the System76 blog. No timeline is provided/known yet for when they hope to ship COSMIC Epoch 2 and Epoch 3.