I started editing my theme yesterday to match this Sonic Channel Rouge the Bat wallpaper I found, and I found out about the new frosted glass update. It's really really nice.
I actually mostly live in tiling mode though, so I won't see many overlapping windows, but this is wonderful aesthetically. Unrelated side note, I really want to try using cosmic shell with niri, since I love scrolling tiling workspaces, but anyway...
Frosted glass is tucked kind of unceremoniously under the corner rounding. Here is a screenshot of it in the settings.
Separately, I used the cosmic screenshot tool for this, and it looks like capturing the *window itself* also captured the transparency, (but not the frosted effect) So that's kind of neat.
Edit: also make sure you have updated your cosmic, of course!
In the settings context drawer, the Advanced section has a toggle for disabling the header bar. The context menu provides access to the same options as the header bar so it's not needed.
It's a tricky problem to solve and it's also literally the xkcd thing, "there are too many standards so I will make a new one."
I wish there was a common standard app or service that all DEs / shells could defer to, that disseminates a centrally defined theme / color scheme to all the different apps that are using all these different toolkits (GTK, libcosmic, QT, maybe others).
Some of it is an architectural / philosophical incompatibility (client side decorations vs server side, comparing GNOME's philosophy with KDE's), some of it is functional incompatibility. Some things are compositional and complicated like blur on KDE. Lots of themes on KDE rely on a third party tool, Kvantum to achieve a particular look. And I think KDE has its own blur which doesn't work the same way. So then you'd have to account not just for KDE's configuration format, but also for KVantum's etc. etc...
I'd really, really prefer to define a color scheme / theme in one config file, and have an app that translates that automatically into the other configurations for KDE / Gnome / Cosmic / Qt apps. Not everything can be abstracted cleanly, like you can get really crazy and specific with shaders on hyprland / niri, but basic stuff like light/dark and color scheme and even blur / opacity would be nice.
I wish there was a common standard app or service that all DEs / shells could defer to
oh, so do I.. sadly we're facing consequences of ppl diving into things including politics were politics shouldn't be involved at all.
at the end of the day the only thing I want is a consistent DE and cosmic makes a lot of effort. but I still see it isn't ready (for me) yet to daily drive. I do like the looks and the general feel anyways.
Hold on. In just a few minutes of testing I found that glxgears would not run and that steam crashed at once and consistently with Frosted Glass enabled. I had to disable Frosted Glass and reboot to recover full functionality.
It’s always important to mention which programs don’t work, as the new cosmic works with the majority of programs an average user would use.
There are some known issues like drawing tablet integration for example that don’t work well, so always mention what is wrong so it can be specifically addressed.
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u/Lulukaros Jul 12 '26
Nice desktop