System76 ships COSMIC Epoch 1.11.0, adds a Wayland dialog protocol to Linux's third desktop
The newest COSMIC release leans on small fixes. Modal dialogs now stay on top, and the Rust-built desktop keeps inching toward "does it feel right."
System76 has released COSMIC Epoch 1.11.0, the newest point release in the fast launch cycle that feeds Pop!_OS. It dropped on October 20, two weeks after 1.10. The headline change is barely exciting on paper: the COSMIC compositor now speaks the xdg-dialog-v1 Wayland protocol, which stops modal dialogs from hiding behind other windows.That's the kind of fix that only annoys you when it's broken.The rest of 1.11 follows the same spirit. There's better handling of hybrid graphics, meaning the right GPU actually gets used for games and apps on systems with both integrated and discrete cards. Getting NVIDIA to work out of the box is a beat System76 keeps coming back to.Keep in mind that 1.11 is, by its own accounting, a maintenance release. The meta-repository behind it shows just three commits touching 28 files, from two contributors. But those commits repoint dozens of submodules. Pull the changelog open and you'll find pull requests spanning roughly 15 separate projects, including libcosmic, the launcher, the compositor and the on-screen keyboard.
The details, and why some of them matter
The changes are small. Then again, most of them are exactly the changes a stable desktop needs.
In the core widget library, text inputs no longer eat the Escape key, so menus don't demand a second press to close. The scrollbar padding got fixed. In COSMIC Edit, JSON files now get a proper MIME association.
The compositor is where the real work landed. Beyond xdg-dialog-v1, it now closes out lingering windows when no displays are attached, and it routes on-screen keyboard activation over a private D-Bus signal. That last one sounds like a detail for the archives. It matters because it fixes the virtual keyboard when paired with other input methods.
User-facing, the standouts are new touchpad options: "tap and drag" and "drag lock." Tap an item twice to flick it, or lift a finger mid-drag without dropping what you're holding. Both land in COSMIC Settings.
There's more. Search in the Pop!_OS launcher is now always case-insensitive and smarter about words inside parentheses. The notification applet actually starts again. The display settings page stops crashing on certain screens.
For context on why these micro-touches are suddenly a theme, consider the launcher. Epoch 1.10, released October 8, switched COSMIC's quick-launch popup to GPU-accelerated rendering via WGPU by default. That came after a fairly widely shared complaint that the launcher was the slowest in existence, crawling at roughly one frame per second under software rendering. The 1.11 follow-up trims blur regions and tightens search weighting. It's a clear trajectory: make it work, then make it feel good.
A third stack, on its own terms
The bigger picture is harder to summarize in a single feature. COSMIC is the third major GUI stack on Linux, built almost entirely in Rust and licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. It joined the effort because maintaining Pop!_OS's GNOME tiling extension became unsustainable. Upstream changes could break it at will. Forking GNOME wholesale meant decades of legacy code. Building from scratch, in a memory-safe language, gave System76 control.
It's arguably competing with GNOME and KDE on their own terms now. The first stable deployment arrived December 11, 2025, when Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS shipped COSMIC as its default desktop. Whether that Rust-native stack becomes a durable option for more than System76's own hardware remains to be seen, though the cross-platform ambitions of libcosmic, aimed at Windows and macOS, suggest the company wants it to.
Is it a reason to upgrade on principle? Not really.
If you're running Pop!_OS, COSMIC ships as the default environment and updates through the normal path, since the distro typically gets submodule updates before they're tagged into an Epoch release. On other distros, COSMIC is packaged for Fedora and Arch Linux, with install instructions on System76's site. Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS no longer receives Epoch updates, though individual apps can still be installed via apt there.
Head here to check the full release, commits and submodule bumps.
