System76’s latest COSMIC update improves touchpad dragging, hybrid-graphics handling and compositor stability, alongside more consistent search, display and virtual-keyboard behaviour.
System76 has released COSMIC Desktop 1.11, a point update to its Rust-based desktop environment that focuses on usability, graphics handling and compositor stability. According to Linuxiac and Phoronix, the release is not a broad visual redesign, but it does address several day-to-day behaviours that matter on modern laptops and hybrid-graphics systems.
One of the most visible changes is in COSMIC Settings, where users can now toggle tap-and-drag and drag lock for touchpads. System76’s support guidance explains that tap-and-drag lets a user move an item after a double-tap, while drag lock allows a finger to be lifted briefly during a drag without releasing the item. The same update also improves GPU selection on machines with both integrated and dedicated graphics, with System76 saying its App Library now helps games start on the intended GPU and that the launcher has been adjusted for other applications as well.
The compositor has also gained support for the Wayland xdg-dialog-v1 protocol, which should keep modal dialogs in front of the windows they belong to rather than letting them disappear behind other content. Phoronix notes that this change, alongside the multi-GPU work, stands out because it affects core desktop behaviour even in a modest release. System76 has also fixed an issue in which closed windows were not cleared properly when no displays were connected.
Elsewhere, COSMIC 1.11 includes refinements to on-screen keyboard behaviour, with fixes for input methods using the virtual keyboard protocol and improved communication between the compositor and the keyboard component. The launcher now handles search more consistently, including case-insensitive queries and better matching for words inside parentheses, while the App Library selects the first matching application when users press the down arrow after searching. System76 also says it has fixed display settings failures on some monitors, improved mouse-wheel and touchpad volume control, addressed notification applet startup problems, and added JSON file associations in COSMIC Edit. It has also updated translations and dependencies across several COSMIC components.
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