Compiled by Larry Cafiero
Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reported on Thursday that the Cosmic 1.9 desktop has been released, with improvements including upgrades on the Cosmic Viewer, Cosmic OSK, and a revamp of the Cosmic Store.
“Coming about two weeks after Cosmic 1.8, the Cosmic 1.9 release introduces two new apps, namely Cosmic Viewer as an image viewer that supports a wide range of formats and features built-in editing capabilities, and Cosmic OSK as an on-screen keyboard that supports both touch and gamepad input,” the article says.
But wait, there’s more.
“Cosmic 1.9 also revamps the Cosmic Store’s design with the ability to highlight the developer of each application or applet, adds support for syncing font settings for Gnome apps, adds a toggle to Gnome Settings for showing the day of the week, and adds settings for the new on-screen keyboard in Gnome Settings,” the article says.
The article also says that Cosmic Greeter “received optional support for systemd-homed and a new button to toggle the on-screen keyboard, Cosmic Files can now show icons for .exe files, Cosmic Compositor allows layer shell programs like the background and on-screen keyboard to be shown on the lock screen, and Cosmic Panel’s border thickness is now configurable.”
Cosmic 1.9 fixes numerous bugs across all apps and components “to improve things like the context menus in the Cosmic App Library and Cosmic Launcher, pixelated icons in the Cosmic App Library and Cosmic Launcher, the Esc key not closing menus for several apps, and the drag selection box not updating in Cosmic Files,” the article says.
PeppermintOS warms to XLibre
Abhishek Prakash in It’s FOSS reported on Tuesday that PeppermintOS is moving away from Xorg and choosing Xlibre to avoid using Wayland in its distro, with the lightweight distro shipping Xlibre in its upcoming Debian- and Devuan-based ISO.
“Reason is simple,” the article says. “Development on the original Xorg has stalled and most distributions have switched to Wayland. XLibre exists with the aim to keep maintaining, modernizing, and cleaning up the codebase for people who still prefer X11.”
According to the article, “XLibre is built as a drop-in replacement for xorg, and it aims not to break standard desktop environments, window managers, or older drivers, and PeppermintOS says its testing so far has gone as expected.”
The article also states that PeppermintOS says it has no immediate plans to move to Wayland, pointing to Xfce’s roadmap of supporting both Xorg and Wayland natively. Xfce is the default offering from PeppermintOS.
“By the way, this is the project’s first Debian-based ISO built without Debian’s traditional live-build tools, moving instead to mmdebstrap, mirroring what PeppermintOS already did for its Devuan edition,” the article says.
That Devuan build has also been updated to use XLibre and is close to community testing.
Mageia 9 support ends, upgrade urged
Bobby Borisov of Linuxiac reported on Friday that Sept. 30 is the cutoff date for Mageia 9 support, and users are urged to upgrade to Mageia 10 for continued upgrades and security fixes.
“More than three years after its release in August 2023, Mageia 9 is nearing the end of support, which will conclude on September 30, 2026,” the article states. “After that, it will no longer receive validated updates, including security fixes.”
The article states that Mageia 9 debuted on August 27, 2023, powered by Linux kernel 6.4 and offering KDE Plasma 5.27, GNOME 44, and Xfce 4.18 among its main desktop options. During its lifetime, the release received over 24,000 updates, including security fixes delivered by the distribution’s packaging, security, and QA teams.
“The distro follows a policy of supporting the previous major release for three months after a new one becomes available. With Mageia 10 officially released on June 30, 2026, that grace period is now coming to an end,” the article states.
According to the article, “users still running Mageia 9 are encouraged to move to Mageia 10. The upgrade can be started through Mageia’s major-version update application in the system tray or done from the command line using the steps in the project’s release notes.”
AlmaLinux gets new certifications
Christine Hall at FOSS Force reported on Friday that AlmaLinux’s new beefed-up hardware and software certification program aims to make finding out how well your hardware and software will work with the distro as easy as looking at its catalog.
According to the article, “the original version, released by the AlmaLinux Certification SIG in September 2024, was a groundbreaker. It made AlmaLinux the first RHEL clone to offer hardware certification, something that Red Hat was already offering its users. The problem was that AlmaLinux’s version was time-consuming.”
But . . . “The old program worked, but it asked too much time of you and of us, and this is how we fixed it!” the article quotes Jonathan Wright, AlmaLinux’s Infrastructure SIG lead and a member of its Engineering Steering Committee, who explained it in Thursday’s announcement on the distro’s website.
AlmaLinux board chair benny Vazquez clarifies further.
“For us in this context, it only means we know that AlmaLinux runs correctly on this hardware, or this software runs correctly on AlmaLinux,” she replied in the article. “It’s about compatibility, and isn’t intended to mean any regulatory or security certification on its own.”
The article concludes with a link. “If you’re wondering where to look to see what hardware or software has been validated for what version of AlmaLinux, go to the AlmaLinux Certification Catalog,” it says. “Every listing identifies the tester, whether it was the vendor, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, or a community member. The listings show information for systems, components, software, benchmarks, and validations.”
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return with news over the week next Saturday.