System76 is hard at work on COSMIC, a new Linux desktop environment focus on productivity and performance. Now, Alpha 3 is rolling out to testers.

COSMIC Alpha first became available for testing in August, and a second alpha release in September rolled out more improvements. It’s a brand-new desktop environment that vaguely resembles GNOME Shell, with an integrated tiling system, customizable top and bottom panels, themes, and a codebase written in Rust.

The new alpha release now supports screen readers “in an early testable state,” and has new interface customization options, like changing the system font and icons. The COSMIC Files app has improved Preview and Gallery modes, and the file search has been improved. System76 also added support for mounting encrypted drives, running executable files, and JPEG XL to the Files app in this release.

System76 has also updated the underlying framework for its apps and desktop, called libcosmic. The company said in a blog post, “Applications, the App Library, and Launcher have been updated to a major new version of libcosmic. We anticipate some regressions with this update. Bug reports are appreciated!”

There are a pile of smaller changes, too. The new “Made for COSMIC” section in the COSMIC Store (the system app store) highlights apps built specifically for the desktop, networks should now reconnect more reliably. System76 has also fixed many bugs, including issues with the launcher, mouse behavior, and animations.

COSMIC is being developed as the new default desktop environment for System76’s Pop!_OS Linux distribution. The distro is currently using a modified version of GNOME as the desktop environment, and COSMIC is expected to replace GNOME when it’s more stable.

You can try out COSMIC Alpha 3 by downloading the latest ISO from System76’s website. Again, it’s alpha-quality software, so you’re better off using it on a non-critical PC or inside a virtual machine.

Source: System76