System76 Ships COSMIC Epoch 1.5, Fixing Chromium Scaling Bugs and Raising the Wallpaper Limit to 500
System76 released COSMIC Epoch 1.5.0, fixing Chromium/Electron scaling bugs, a D-Bus deadlock, and raising the wallpaper limit from 100 to 500.
Overview
System76 has released COSMIC Epoch 1.5.0, the latest update to its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment, fixing a workaround for Chromium and Electron apps that break under fractional display scaling and raising the wallpaper-management limit from 100 to 500 images. As Phoronix put it, “The System76 and Pop!_OS developers continue quickly iterating on their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment.”
What We Know
The release notes on GitHub describe a “Workaround for Chromium apps breaking below 1.0 scaling,” addressing a longstanding annoyance for users who run displays at fractional scale factors under 100 percent. Phoronix independently describes the same underlying bug as “an issue with Chromium-based apps breaking with below 1.0 fractional scaling,” while Linuxiac explains that Chromium-based applications “have a tendency to malfunction when the display scaling is set below 100%,” and that the COSMIC compositor “has now included a workaround that improves how Chromium and Electron applications function under less common scaling settings.”
The compositor component, cosmic-comp, also picks up several stability fixes this release. According to the GitHub release notes, the update will “Fix dbus deadlock in a11y keyboard monitor,” “Ensure X window focus on unmap/map,” and ensure the compositor won’t “panic when renderer creation fails after a GPU reset.” Linuxiac corroborates the same set of fixes, noting that “a deadlock involving D-Bus in the accessibility keyboard monitor has been fixed, correct behavior has been ensured when X11 windows regain focus after having been unmapped and then remapped again, and a crash is avoided in the case of a failure during renderer creation after a GPU reset.”
COSMIC Panel, the project’s taskbar-like shell component, gets its own round of fixes. The GitHub changelog lists a fix for “high CPU usage when screen is locked,” along with fixes for touch input, a frosted-glass rendering fix for applets on a hotplugged external monitor, and a fix for flickering when the frosted-glass effect is preserved through a window-maximize action. Phoronix also flags the “high CPU usage when the screen is locked” fix, while AlternativeTo describes the release more broadly as bringing “fixes for display scaling, stability, panel performance, and multi monitor support,” including “fixes for touch input on touchscreen devices.”
COSMIC Settings gets the most user-visible change: according to the GitHub release, the wallpaper system now supports adding “multiple images at once,” and the changelog specifies the developers “Increase wallpaper limit from 100 to 500.” The same release also uses EXIF orientation data for wallpapers in both cosmic-bg and cosmic-settings, fixes a one-pixel gap between outputs caused by a rounding error in multi-monitor setups, and stops storing VPN usernames as secrets. COSMIC Greeter, the login screen, adds support for the “cosmic-keymap-unstable-v1” Wayland protocol, per the same GitHub changelog. COSMIC Term gains configurable terminal pane borders, and the desktop portal (xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic) adds support for metadata-based cursor capture during screen casting.
On distribution availability, Linuxiac reports that “COSMIC Desktop 1.5 packages are expected to arrive in the repositories of rolling-release distros such as Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CachyOS, and others shortly,” adding that “Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS users already have it available as an update.”
What We Don’t Know
None of the cited sources give an exact release date for the prior COSMIC Epoch 1.4 release, so the precise interval between the two versions isn’t confirmed beyond Phoronix’s general characterization of the project’s “quickly iterating” release cadence. Timelines for when each individual rolling-release distribution will actually package 1.5.0 are not specified beyond “shortly.”
Analysis
The fixes in this release — a fractional-scaling workaround for Chromium and Electron apps, a wallpaper-management overhaul, and a cluster of compositor stability patches — are incremental rather than headline features, consistent with a project shipping frequent point releases rather than saving fixes for a larger milestone. COSMIC remains one of the more actively developed Rust-based Linux desktop environments, and its tight release cycle gives Pop!_OS and other early adopters a steady stream of small but user-facing improvements rather than infrequent, larger jumps.