 Okay, so it has been four months since my last cosmic video and a lot has happened. So let me repeat, this is an incredibly cool project that's building everything from the ground up, something I hardly thought possible in a new programming language, Rust, and a new graphical toolkit, Iced. So firstly, PopOS is really known for its tiling functionalities in the past and these were built on top of the GNOME window manager and could be seen as a really well done plugin. In fact, even though they did not follow up on it yet, System76 even said they wanted to bring PopOS tiling to other desktops as well, probably they're busy. Either way, tiling has to be built from scratch yet again due to cosmic and the team has taken this as a great occasion to change how it works. Firstly, there used to be an adjustment mode, toggled by SuperEnter, to arrange the windows and resize tiled windows. The cosmic team did not like this extra step required to adjust the layout and they decided to get rid of it entirely. They instead introduced a rather intuitive set of shortcuts. SuperArrows will move the focus around and Shift SuperArrows will move the focus window around. When you start using these shortcuts, the window will become slightly smaller and the background will feed out to show that you're currently adjusting windows. This is a subtle but easy to miss, so good job, System76. In this mode, all windows will get an outline. Gray for normal windows and light blue for the selected ones. Now here's a very cool thing, you will be able to group windows together. When you do, the entire group will act as a single window, meaning that you can select it and move the whole thing together without changing its layout. You can also resize the group and all of the windows within it will also resize and of course you will still be able to adjust the tiling within a group and take applications inside or outside the group as well. Creating a group does not have any shortcut. The idea is that if you want a certain layout, you can just achieve it by moving the windows around. So if you want to create a group, you just move one window towards another and they will join together. If you didn't want that, you can just keep moving the same window in the same direction and the window will just exit the group in the other direction. Everything is extremely intuitive. The other way to combine windows together is through stacking. By the way, it was called window tabbing in KD until we just got rid of it and lost the feature. So yeah, pretty cool that PopoS is just making fun of KD Plasma from this point of view. The idea is to join different windows together and the tabs will just appear on the title bar. You can see here the design for Cosmic. The current tab is indicated by an accent color to stand out and if there are too many tabs, then you'll be able to just click an arrow in the header area. Another thing that was worked on in regards to tiling is mouse-driven tiling so that you can drag and drop windows around to change the layout. If you do that, an indicator appears to show which windows are grouped together whilst a transparent background indicates how that window will be arranged in its new position. If you drag and drop a window on top of another window, as an example, the window will just tile vertically, but this is cool. If you drag and drop a window at the center of another, they will just get grouped together. Finally, if you drag and drop a window in the space between two other windows, it will be tiled between them. So pretty cool stuff. In fact, being able to use the same code between keyboard and mouse tiling simplifies the interface so much that Victoria, the engineer that worked on the implementation, said tiling is one of the most complex parts of our show, so that, as in making the tiling code more readable, was a personal highlight for me. Next topic, we finally have a good idea on the customization options that Cosmic will have. This was an explicit goal early on in the design and there are some quite unique ideas that you won't find in other desktops. Now of course, you get all the usual stuff, so there's a light and dark theme and you can also pick between accent colors at selected range or you can just pick your own. In Keri Plasma, you have the concept of color schemes, which can set all the colors of your system. Sometimes you can do some pretty big damage by choosing the incorrect colors. Also you have to find a color scheme that you like, as doing one from scratch is probably too much work for most users. Cosmic instead tried to find a solution that's also really flexible, but that doesn't allow for unusable setups and it's made it so that it's easy to customize even from random users. So this solution is, you are displayed with four colors, the background color, primary container color, the interface text palette tint and the neutral palette tint. The first two colors are pretty obvious, but the entire color scheme is generated using these four colors and the accent one. As a starting point, it won't be as powerful as manually picking each color in each context, but you can go pretty far with just these four. I think this is a pretty cool concept. Another couple of options that you don't usually see are firstly corner radius. There are three possible styles and you can go from super roundness to less rounded. Then you have a density setting. I don't think I've seen this elsewhere. Density will change the margin between the components to make the whole interface more or less compact. This is something that was actually brought up in KD development chats, but doing this type of actually implementing it isn't easy, quite the opposite. So another area of improvement is handling the notifications. In most desktops, that's easy enough. You get a notification, you show the notification to the user. But it's not always that easy. In KD Plasma, as an example, notifications are displayed by the notification applet. And you might have more than one applet in different monitors. The applet might be in different parts of the monitor and so on. Now that Cosmic is also introducing the concept of a modular applet that you can place in panels, they kind of have the same issue. What they're doing then is a notification diamond that reads the notification and throws those to the notification applets. If I understood this correctly, you can choose whether the notification is displayed by the applet on all screens or just one. Oh, and by the way, yes. This means that notifications are getting their own applet and they want to be in the calendar applet as they used to be. Interestingly enough, even GNOME is currently thinking of moving notifications to the season tree. It seems like in just a few years, nobody will be putting notifications in the calendar anymore. That's a dying concept. On top of that, in Cosmic, multiple notifications of the same application will be stacked together to produce clutter and that was it for notifications. Next up, Cosmic introduced the ability to resize a window with your keyboard. Again, we're really not talking about anything extraordinary or unseen before, but that's because this video is all about people building a desktop from scratch, so I'll take it. The shortcuts are super arrows and shift super arrows. When you press them, a hint will appear helping you remember the shortcuts and you'll get an arrow to the borders indicating the movement. Of course, all other tile windows will also adjust accordingly. Wallpapers. The wallpaper system settings section has been written. You can, you guessed it, select a wallpaper, but also a solid color and a simple gradient. K-plasma has that, by the way. You'll be able to choose whether to show the same background on all monitors or not, whether to stretch or scale the wallpaper, and you can even have a slideshow. I would say we've got all the important stuff for sure. Nothing fancy, but all the important stuff. Next up is a fractional scaling, and this is a new feature compared to what PopoS has now. However, I'm slightly confused by it, so GNOME, which PopoS currently relies on, does not support fractional scaling. They do give you the option to use fractional scaling in system settings, but that will actually render your window at twice the size and then scale it down to what you actually asked for. It's not actually fractional scaling, it's pay. If you're interested, I have an entire video about all fractional scaling stuff. Cosmic now has an option in display settings called fractional scaling, and you can set it, though it has only three options between 100 and 200, that is 125, 150, 175. KDPL has many more steps between these. The text says, this month fractional scaling functionality was implemented into the Cosmic Desktop as well. I think this means that you do get actual fractional scaling, and not a fake one. However, I would have to ask the developers that. I'll keep you updated. Another core functionality that Cosmic just got is user permission through a Polkit agent. This means that whenever, as an example, an application requires a password or requires any other special permission, a dialogue will pop up explaining who wants the permission and why. Again, nothing groundbreaking, but all these components are being developed by scratch. And yes, this is four months' worth of Cosmic development. So I do think that we're going to wait a bit more for the final release, but this is everything I have so far. I will keep you updating about the latest and coolest stuff from this desktop. Do let me say that the time to actually, you know, research, write the script, record the script, and then edit, get all the equipment. All of this takes time, takes money to pay the editor and such. So if I'm able to do it, it's thanks to the people whose names you should be seeing around my face. And if you want to join this quite long already, thank you, list. There's people all pattern, liver pay, there's Kofi even. There's a lot of ways you can just tip in something for the channel and make sure that I keep on talking just about how cool this desktop that doesn't exist and we cannot use yet is. So yeah.