Category: Cosmic

Bits & Bobs: Cosmic 1.6 released

Compiled by Larry Cafiero

Marcus Nestor on 9 to 5 Linux reported on Tuesday that System76 released a new Cosmic desktop environment with new improvements.

“Coming three weeks after Cosmic 1.5, the Cosmic 1.6 release adds support for the wl-dmabuf-v6 Wayland protocol for passing direct memory buffers (dma-buf) between clients and compositors, and adds support for the EI (Emulated Input) Wayland protocol to simulate hardware input devices, such as keyboards and mice,” the article says.

Also, the Cosmic Files file manager “received a context menu for text fields and selectable text widgets, Cosmic Greeter can now detect the presence of logind at runtime and supports JPEG-XL and AVIF images, Cosmic Settings now offers app-specific settings, and the cosmic-settings-daemon can now handle playback-specific sound settings,” according to the article.

“On top of that, Cosmic 1.6 fixes various issues, including infinite dialogs in COSMIC Files with network mount failures, Cosmic Launcher flickering and closing when using the Ctrl modifier, a panic on -1 max brightness value in the cosmic-settings-daemon, and fixes COSMIC Settings to no longer unload the active page during search,” the article says.

Garuda Linux Temeraire Released

Bobby Borisov of Linuxiac reported on Wednesday that Garuda Linux has released a new version of its distro, code-named Temeraire, with a new CachyOS-based kernel, Plasma Login Manager, revamped Hyprland setup, and major tooling changes.

In the first major update to Garuda in over a year and powered by Linux kernel 7.2, the Arch Linux-based distribution introduces several changes including better NVIDIA support for Sway and more unified administration tools.

But wait, there’s more.

“This release also brings a small change to Garuda’s identity,” the article explains. “Previously, versions were named after eagles and other birds of prey. With Temeraire, the project will now use well-known dragon names. For those who are most curious, the name for this release comes from the dragon in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels.”

According to the article, the KDE Plasma editions have also been updated. “Both Plasma versions now use Plasma Login Manager instead of SDDM, even in live environments,” the article states. “Existing systems were already updated in earlier releases. Additionally, Garuda has refreshed its themes and removed the Better Blur plugin because it sometimes hurt performance.”

In addition, the Hyprland edition has seen even bigger changes. “Its configuration is now fully rewritten in Lua. G-Hyprland settings are available as Lua-based presets, along with several ready-made profiles for customizing the desktop. Existing users should already have the new setup after running garuda-update,” the article says.

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 weekend on Monday.

Bits & Bobs: Cosmic 1.5 released

Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reported on Wednesday that computer maker System76 released version 1.5 of the Cosmic desktop environment.

Based on Rust, the desktop environment’s improvements are generally based on performance issues.

“Coming only a week after Cosmic 1.4, the Cosmic 1.5 release is here to fix high CPU panel usage when the screen is locked, fix panel touch input, fix panel flickering when using the Frosted Glass effect when preserving style on window maximize, and fix Frosted Glass for panel applets on hotplugging an external monitor,” the article says.

Other specific improvements include a workaround to fix a Chromium issue when scaling, a fix for D-Bus deadlock, and a fix for an issue causing panic when rendering fails after a GPU reset, among other bugs in version 1.4.

“This release also brings some changes to COSMIC Settings with slider widget handle improvements, a fix for the one-pixel gap between outputs due to rounding errors, support for adding multiple images at once in the Wallpaper pane, which now supports up to 500 wallpapers, and networking improvements by no longer storing the VPN username as a secret,” the article says.

Check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page for more details about the changes included in COSMIC 1.5.

Oops! Still GPL items in FreeBSD kernel

Christine Hall at FOSS Force reported on Wednesday that actually some of the GPL-based software in FreeBSD may still be lurking in some of the corners of that particular operating system’s kernel.

“A couple of weeks back we told you that the folks at FreeBSD had removed all GPL code from their operating system to keep the world safe for devs with copyleft allergies,” the article states. “The OS was thought to be GPL-free after the removal of dpv, a toolset that contains the GPL tool ‘dialog.’

That’s evidently important to BSD folks, who think that software freedom means the freedom to make it private.”

But . . .

“Unfortunately, the dev team at FreeBSD left some other GPL code behind, so the GPL still lurks, sprinkled in the FreeBSD kernel, of all places,” the article continues. “It’s in a header file that was copy and pasted from the Linux kernel for Qualcomm SoCs. There are also some GPLv2 snippets in the Device Tree.”

So it’s back to the drawing board for the FreeBSD developers. We’ll keep you updated on this as we find out more.

‘Stonking Stingray’ moving along

Sourav Rudra wrote an article in It’s FOSS on Wednesday about the improvements coming to the next Ubuntu version to be released in October.

“Every two years, Canonical puts out a Long Term Support release that gets five years of security updates, which can be stretched further with Ubuntu Pro,” the article states. “In between those LTS releases, Canonical ships an interim version every six months, and each one is supported for nine months.”

Those releases don’t carry the same importance as an LTS, but that’s the point, according to Rudra. They give Canonical room to test newer kernels, toolchains, and design changes with a smaller user base before those changes get baked into the next LTS.

“The next one, Ubuntu 26.10, carries the codename ‘Stonking Stingray’, continuing the tradition of ordered alphabetical codenames after Resolute Raccoon (26.04),” the article continues.

According to the article, “stonking” is British slang for something impressively big or excellent, and a stingray is the flat-bodied, boneless fish that spends most of its time half-buried in sand near the seafloor.

The article brings to the fore the schedule for the releases, with the next one being a Feature Freeze on Aug. 20, and the testing week takes place a week later on Aug. 27.

The article also states that “[i]f things go as planned, it will land on October 15, 2026, with a short support window that will close in July 2027.”

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 weekend on Monday.

Bits & Bobs: New shutdown for Tails 7.10

By Larry Cafiero

Marcus Nestor of 9 to 5 Linux reported on Thursday that Tails 7.10 was released a month after Tails 7.9, with a couple of improvements.

“Tails 7.10 has been released today as the latest version of this Debian-based distribution designed to protect you against surveillance and censorship by leveraging the Tor anonymous network,” the article states.

The article continues saying that Tails 7.9, “which only updated to Tor Browser 15.0.16 and some firmware packages, the Tails 7.10 release is a bigger one, introducing a new shutdown procedure, the one from the Gnome desktop environment, which is slower but better prevents data loss. The previous, faster emergency shutdown can still be used.”

The Tails team was quoted in the article: “For example, the Power Off confirmation dialog informs you if an application needs to be closed or an open document needs to be saved before shutting down . . . Even without confirming or saving the open documents, Tails will shut down after 60 seconds.”

In other improvements in the new version, “Tails 7.10 also replaces GNOME Videos with Celluloid as the default video player app, updates the Tor Browser to version 15.0.19, updates some firmware packages to improve support for newer hardware graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on, and fixes various bugs,” the article states.

New Cosmic desktop version released

Michael Larabel at Phoronix reported on Wednesday that the System76 developers have released a new version of their Cosmic desktop environment.

“System76 developers today released Cosmic Epoch 1.4 as the newest stable release to their Rust-based desktop environment,” the article states.

According to the article, “Cosmic Epoch 1.4 brings a wide variety of fixes, cosmic-sound-theme packaging, translation updates, and some minor feature work to different COSMIC components too.”

The article continues to say that the Cosmic Compositor “has seen a number of fixes for input and window handling, improving screen edge pointer accuracy with fractional scaling, and more. COSMIC Panel has seen crash fixes.”

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 on Monday.