System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 as the newest incremental update to this Rust-based desktop developed in-step with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

One of the notable changes to COSMIC Epoch 1.10 is using the GPU "WGPU" rendering code path by default for the COSMIC Launcher. Due to some systems performing extremely slow with the software renderer that it feels sluggish, the GPU rendering is now enabled by default. This stems from a recent bug report calling "Cosmic Launcher still the slowest launcher in existence":

"I've tried it on 3 different machines, ranging from Intel, through AMD to Nvidia and for whatever reason, the moment you type in anything into the search box, the scroll through the list becomes unbearably slow (approx 1fps). It doesn't matter if you're scrolling using the mouse or just traversing the list with arrow keys, the refresh is abysmally slow. The text input also becomes progressively slower and slower the more you type.

This has been the case since day one. Supposedly, at one point, someone somewhere wrote it's an iced issue, and the problem would go away after updating to newer iced - but nothing changed.

It's a massive bummer that a desktop environment as sleek and fast to use as Cosmic gets bogged down on the most basic / elementary of UI components."

Now the slow COSMIC Launcher should be resolved with GPU rendering.

COSMIC Epoch 1.10 also now allows mapping drawing tablets to specific displays, a number of fixes to the COSMIC Compositor, the COSMIC Initial Setup will only show its WiFi page if a WiFi adapter is present, and a wide variety of other fixes.

Downloads and more details on COSMIC Epoch 1.10 via GitHub.