COSMIC Epoch 1.7 Released: No Longer Slow Browsing Network Filesystems

COSMIC Epoch 1.7 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based open-source desktop environment with development led by System76.

The change I find most notable with COSMIC Epoch 1.7 is for the COSMIC-Files file manager that browsing network file-systems such as via SFTP will be much faster than previously. Going back to 2024 has been a bug report over slow SFTP connection speeds with COSMIC's file manager. It was noted that COSMIC's load time would increase with the number of files in a given directory and also greater network traffic than using GNOME's Nautilus file manager.

That's now been fixed in the past week via this change for remote filesystem detection and avoiding excessive operations for non-local files. Up to now remote files were treated the same as local files within GNOME-Files and thus caused excessive work when loading directories via remote protocols.

COSMIC Epoch 1.7 also has a fix to always turn on the screen when the computer is unlocked, the compositor will increase zoom with each key-press, and a variety of other fixes and improvements. The full list of v1.7 changes can be found on GitHub.