System76 released COSMIC Epoch 1.7 on August 25, one week after 1.6 landed with per-application volume control. The cadence is worth noting on its own: this project is shipping user-facing features weekly.

Shake to find the cursor

Shake the mouse and the pointer magnifies, making it easy to locate on a large or high-resolution display.

macOS has had this for over a decade and it is one of those features people do not request because they do not know to ask for it. On a multi-monitor setup, losing the pointer is a small daily friction that this removes entirely.

Cursor rendering also improved, so an enlarged cursor stays sharp instead of turning blurry when scaled. That matters more than it sounds on HiDPI displays, where a scaled cursor that resamples badly is a persistent visual annoyance.

The remote desktop portal

The quieter and more consequential change is a remote desktop portal implementation in COSMIC’s XDG Desktop Portal backend.

This is the mechanism that lets software control the keyboard and mouse under Wayland. X11 let any application inject input events freely, and Wayland removed that deliberately, which broke automation tools, remote desktop software, and anything else that needed to synthesise input.

The portal is the permission-gated replacement. System76 specifically calls out Steam Input working through it, which is the sort of concrete result that matters more than the abstract capability: a controller mapping to keyboard input is exactly the kind of thing that quietly stopped working during the Wayland transition.

This follows the EI protocol support added in 1.6, and together they close most of the remaining gap for input automation on COSMIC.

Files and Edit

COSMIC Files gains the ability to navigate to a network location from anywhere in the file manager rather than only from a specific view, and network filesystem browsing is faster.

Anyone reaching Samba or NFS shares regularly will notice both. Slow network browsing is one of those things that makes a file manager feel worse than it is, because the delay lands at the moment you are trying to do something.

COSMIC Edit received fixes alongside the rest.

Where COSMIC is now

Two releases in a week, both adding things people would notice rather than internal refactoring, is a reasonable signal about where the project sits. The features arriving now are accumulated small conveniences rather than architecture, which is what a desktop looks like when it moves from impressive to usable.

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS users get it through normal updates, and it is packaged for Fedora, Arch, NixOS, and openSUSE on their own schedules.

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade   # Pop!_OS
sudo pacman -Syu cosmic                    # Arch