New Cosmic DE Alpha 2 update adds slew of customisation options alongside app and settings improvements for the System76 Linux desktop

It's hardly been a month since System76 officially released its Cosmic desktop environment for Linux. While that first alpha build of the Cosmic DE was a great first step for the new desktop environment, it was far from feature-complete or polished. In the time since then, System76 has put in a lot of work to make Cosmic a fully fledged desktop environment — work that culminated in the Alpha 2 release earlier this week.

In the alpha 2 release, announced on the System76 blog, the development team focussed its efforts around fixing major bugs and making the desktop genuinely usable as a daily driver. You can read the full release notes, but the highlights are as follows:

• Window focus can now be set to Focus follows cursor or Cursor follows focus — handy for both mouse users and keyboard navigation fanatics.
• The Appearance settings page now allows adjusting UI density to make things more touch-friendly or more dense for power users.
• Cosmic Files has new UI elements and navigation options:
  • File menu allows creating and compressing or extracting files and folders.
  • New preview sidebar on selecting a file.
  • File manager defaults to floating instead of tiling when opened by another app for file uploads and downloads.

• The Power & Battery settings page now shows battery levels for connected devices and allow setting maximum charge level and power modes (Extended battery life, Balanced, and High performance modes).
• Sound settings gets new options for input and output devices, including audio profiles and output-specific volume control.
• VPN and wired connection management options added to the Settings app.

The UI density options, changes to Cosmic Files, and window focus options are all particularly useful for those who want to daily drive Cosmic, since they add sorely missing features and allow for deeper levels of customisation. However, Cosmic Alpha 2 has also improved some things under the hood, making the new DE more stable and production-ready.

For starters, the System76 development team addressed bugs that affected X11 and XWayland apps when run full-screen. Gaming via Proton and image editing with GIMP also saw some improvements in Cosmic Alpha 2, thanks to stability improvements and specific bugs that were addressed.

System76 also provided a timeline for what to expect from Cosmic going forward, confirming that there will be a monthly Alpha version until the Cosmic DE is feature-complete.

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