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System76 has announced the release of COSMIC Desktop 1.4, delivering another round of enhancements to its Rust-powered desktop environment. The latest version focuses on improving system monitoring, window management, file handling, and overall desktop reliability.
One of the most noticeable updates arrives in the COSMIC System Monitor. Users can now terminate applications gracefully or force them to close if they become unresponsive. The tool also introduces selectable CPU and GPU graph styles, refreshed visual elements, and support for displaying GPU frequency data, giving users a more informative view of system performance.
Gaming and desktop responsiveness have also received attention. The COSMIC compositor includes fixes that resolve fullscreen issues affecting certain games, while flickering experienced when navigating menus in tiled applications has been eliminated. Additional improvements enhance pointer accuracy near display edges when using fractional scaling and correct inconsistent window border sizes under the same scaling mode.
The update further refines tiled window behavior by addressing input issues with cropped windows and fixing problems that could leave active window indicators frozen or detached.
COSMIC Files also becomes more dependable, particularly when transferring files to smartphones and other portable devices. If an MTP destination cannot be accessed, the file manager now automatically falls back to GIO, improving transfer reliability. It also includes a fix for more accurate detection of trash directories.
The COSMIC Launcher has been updated to automatically refresh its results whenever a search query changes, providing a cleaner and more intuitive search experience.
Several stability improvements have been made across other desktop components as well. COSMIC Panel resolves two crash scenarios, including one triggered after adjusting display scaling, while COSMIC Settings fixes an issue that could unintentionally modify an output device’s volume when changing an input source.
A new configuration option has also been added to the COSMIC Settings Daemon, allowing users to customize the volume adjustment increment for each keyboard volume key press.
On the audio side, System76 has introduced a new sound theme intended for distribution packaging. The company plans to make it the default in a future release as the older Pop sound theme repository has now been deprecated.
Behind the scenes, the desktop portal has also been modernized. It now runs as a system service, integrates logging through tracing and journald, and can exit cleanly if its Wayland thread encounters a failure, contributing to improved stability.
COSMIC Desktop 1.4 is expected to arrive soon in the repositories of rolling-release Linux distributions such as Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and CachyOS. Users running Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS can already install the update through the standard software update process.
For additional details, refer to the changelog.
