Building off the [1]COSMIC Alpha 4 release from early December, COSMIC Alpha 5 is now available as the newest stepping stone toward the first stable release of this Rust-based open-source desktop developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

COSMIC Alpha 5 is now shipping the COSMIC Media Player as their new default media player. COSMIC Media Player supports the Vulkan API for rendering and VA-API GPU-accelerated video decoding. COSMIC Media Player doesn't yet support audio playback. Here's a screenshot of the COSMIC Media Player from System76 in its current form:

COSMIC Alpha 5 also has improvements to Alt+Tab ordering, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) improvements, continued work on the settings area, and a variety of other fixes throughout this Rust-based desktop.

More details on the COSMIC Alpha 5 desktop release via the [2]System76 blog .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Alpha-4-Released

[2] https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-alpha-5-released?s=09