COSMIC 1.3.0: Frosted Glass Finally Lands

COSMIC 1.3.0: Frosted Glass Finally Lands

Frosted Glass Takes Centre Stage

Under the Bonnet: Compositor, Settings and Hardware Gains

Applets, Files, Terminal and the Wider Toolkit

A Concluding Word

System76's COSMIC desktop environment has just taken its biggest visual leap yet. On 14th July 2026, the COSMIC Epoch 1.3.0 release landed on GitHub, and headlining the changelog is a feature the community has been asking for since the very first alpha builds: proper frosted glass. It's not just a lick of paint, either. This release touches nearly every corner of the desktop, from the compositor and settings daemon right down to the terminal emulator and file manager, with a healthy pile of bug fixes and hardware improvements tucked in alongside the headline act.

 

For anyone who hasn't been following along, COSMIC is System76's from-scratch desktop environment, built in Rust using the iced toolkit and designed as the eventual default for Pop!_OS. It's a genuinely independent project rather than a fork of GNOME or KDE, which means every feature, however small, tends to represent real engineering effort rather than a config tweak. 1.3.0 is a solid demonstration of that philosophy in action.

 

Frosted Glass Takes Centre Stage

The standout feature of this release is frosted glass support, and System76 aren't shy about how much effort went into it. The official release notes describe it as involving months of work throughout the COSMIC desktop, which tracks with just how many components needed to be touched to make translucency behave properly across panels, docks, applets and windows.

 

For everyday users, turning it on is refreshingly simple. Head into COSMIC Settings, find the Desktop page in the sidebar, then the Appearance section, and there's now a dedicated Frosted glass option sitting in the Style category. From there you can adjust the effect to taste rather than being stuck with a single fixed look.

 

Where things get more interesting is for developers. Because frosted glass reaches so deep into how surfaces are rendered, app and applet authors need to update their libcosmic dependency if they want their software to support the effect properly. This is a fairly common pattern in COSMIC's development cycle: the core team ships a capability, and the wider ecosystem of applets and third-party apps then needs a quick version bump to catch up. If you maintain or package COSMIC applets, this is worth flagging early, since users will likely notice quickly if some elements embrace the new frosted look while others remain stubbornly opaque.

 

It's also worth noting that this sits within a broader wave of translation and dependency updates across many of the COSMIC sub-projects in this release, which is the unglamorous but essential maintenance that keeps a fast-moving desktop environment healthy and accessible to a global audience.

 

Under the Bonnet: Compositor, Settings and Hardware Gains

Scratch beneath the frosted glass headline and there's a substantial list of fixes to cosmic-comp, the Wayland compositor at COSMIC's core. Multi-monitor users get two welcome fixes: laptop screens no longer get stuck displaying the vendor logo when an external monitor is connected, and texture corruption issues affecting systems with multiple GPUs have been addressed. Anyone relying on the built-in magnifier will appreciate the correction to focal point mathematics and the fix for rounding errors, both of which should make zooming feel noticeably steadier.

 

Window management picks up a couple of subtle but satisfying fixes too. A bug that saw unminimised windows settle at the wrong size once their animation finished has been resolved, and fullscreen surfaces are now properly restored back into the window stack rather than getting lost. Touchpad users benefit from a fix that forwards libinput's axis relative direction correctly, resolving some gesture quirks, while systems still leaning on legacy X11 conventions get a sensible fallback for loading pointer themes. The compositor also gains support for the cosmic-keyboard-layout-unstable-v1 protocol, laying groundwork for more flexible keyboard layout handling going forward.

 

Hardware monitoring is another clear focus this cycle. Cosmic-monitor now calculates power usage for AMD and Intel GPUs, displaying both GPU power draw and total VRAM directly in its dashboard, and it collects GPU memory usage specifically for Intel hardware too. NVIDIA users get a practical quality-of-life improvement: GPUs can now be allowed to suspend properly, alongside a handful of other GPU-related refinements. For a desktop environment that's increasingly used on a wide spread of laptops and workstations, this kind of granular hardware visibility matters far more than it might sound on paper.

 

Over in cosmic-settings, volume sliders are now throttled by 128 milliseconds, which should smooth out the experience of dragging them without flooding the audio backend with requests. A bug affecting reverted display orientation changes has been fixed, and image handling gets a boost through avif wallpaper support powered by libdav1d, mirrored by an identical change in cosmic-bg. Networking has also seen a structural shift: both cosmic-settings and the network applet have moved away from a custom NetworkManager integration in favour of nmrs, a change that should mean more consistent and maintainable network handling across the desktop.

 

Applets, Files, Terminal and the Wider Toolkit

The applet tray hasn't been neglected either. The status area applet now forwards mouse scroll events to StatusNotifierItems, which will be a welcome fix for anyone using tray icons that respond to scrolling, such as volume or brightness controls from third-party apps. The Bluetooth applet now shows known devices rather than only currently visible ones, making it easier to reconnect to hardware that isn't actively broadcasting. Input sources have moved onto the cosmic-keymap-unstable-v1 Wayland protocol, aligning with the compositor-side keyboard layout work mentioned earlier.

 

Cosmic-files, the file manager, picks up support for MIME subclasses when scanning dialogs, which should make file-type filtering and previews behave more sensibly for less common formats. A crash triggered by right-clicking a mounted path in the navigation bar has also been squashed, which is exactly the sort of small but irritating bug that makes daily use noticeably smoother once it's gone.

 

The panel and dock haven't been left out of the loop. Cosmic-panel now offers an always-hide option for panels, giving users tighter control over auto-hide behaviour, plus a new option to preserve panel or dock styling when a window is maximised, useful for anyone who likes a consistent look regardless of window state. Frame pacing for embedded applet popups has also been improved, which should translate into smoother animations when interacting with applets tucked inside the panel.

 

Terminal users get two targeted fixes in cosmic-term: fractional mouse wheel scrolling now behaves correctly, and the terminal no longer loses focus simply from clicking its own header bar, a small annoyance that will be familiar to anyone who's accidentally clicked away from their shell mid-task. Pop-launcher now shows the discrete GPU as the default option within COSMIC's context menu, which is a handy touch for laptop users switching between integrated and dedicated graphics for specific applications. Finally, xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic has been hardened so that it avoids handling panics with an abort, improving overall desktop stability when something does go wrong under the hood.

 

Taken together, this isn't a release built around one flashy feature with everything else coasting along behind it. Frosted glass will understandably grab the headlines and the screenshots, but the real substance of 1.3.0 lies in the dozens of compositor, settings, applet and hardware fixes that quietly make COSMIC feel more polished, more stable and considerably more comfortable to live in day to day.

 

A Concluding Word

COSMIC 1.3.0 is a release that rewards patience. The frosted glass effect has clearly been a long time coming, and System76 have used the opportunity to also chip away at a broad spread of compositor bugs, GPU monitoring gaps and everyday annoyances across the desktop's many moving parts. It's a strong showing for a desktop environment that's still relatively young, and a good sign of the momentum behind it. Anyone running Pop!_OS or COSMIC on another distribution would do well to update and see the new look for themselves.

 

Disclaimer: COSMIC, Pop!_OS, System76 and all associated names, logos and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are referenced here purely for identification and reporting purposes. Every effort has been made to ensure this article is accurate and reflects the official release notes at the time of writing, but software changes quickly, so readers are encouraged to consult the official sources below for the latest details. As always, please use open-source software responsibly and in accordance with its licence terms.

 

References:-

• COSMIC Epoch 1.3.0 release notes

• COSMIC Epoch repository

• Full changes since COSMIC Epoch 1.2.0

---

🪟❄️🔍🌫️👓

---

Back to top