System76 engineers remain quite busy working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS operating system as well as other Linux distributions moving forward.

COSMIC desktop development continues moving on with ironing out additional features, addressing various gaps in the desktop compared to other desktop environments, and plenty of bug fixing from user testing. With this month's COSMIC Alpha 6 release some of the changes include:

- Desktop Zoom support is now available via the accessibility settings or via keyboard shortcuts.

- Additional accessibility features like screen reader and magnifier support.

- Desktop view is now supported in COSMIC.

- Additional scaling options are added from 5% to 20% larger.

- Improvements to workspaces like scrolling between workspaces, enhanced previews for workspaces, and more.

- File path completion now works within the COSMIC Files file manager.

- Copy/paste using the middle mouse button is now implemented.

- A "Revert all changes" option for the COSMIC Edit text editor.

- Open Sans is the new default font for COSMIC.

- Resource optimizations with lower memory usage and other performance improvements to the COSMIC desktop environment.

- Many other bug fixes and enhancements.

More details on all of the COSMIC Alpha 6 changes via the [1]System76 blog .



[1] https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-alpha-6-big-leaps-forward