The desktop environment every Linux distro wants just got a sleek frosted glass theme

A few days ago, the founder and CEO of System76, Carl Richell, showed off a new frosted glass effect for the COSMIC desktop environment. At the time, it was only a Pop!_OS thing, but now a new version of COSMIC has brought this sleek new desktop theme to any distro.

COSMIC Epoch 1.3.0 introduces frosted glass for everyone

And it looks amazing

Credit: Carl Richell

You can check out everything new with COSMIC Epoch 1.3.0 over on GitHub. While it features a nice list of changes, the star of the show is definitely the new theme:

Frosted glass is now supported, involving months of work throughout the COSMIC desktop. Open COSMIC Settings, navigate to the Desktop page in the sidebar, then the Appearance page, and finally click on Frosted glass in the Style section to adjust settings.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the new frosted glass effect will magically work with every app right out of the gate. The changelog says that app and applet developers will need to update their libcosmic versions to take advantage of this cool new theme, so it may be a little while before you see it applied to your fave apps.

Other than that, COSMIC Epoch 1.3.0 contains some nice additions. Cosmic-monitor can now show you the power usage for your AMD and Intel GPUs, and the Cosmic-applets Bluetooth integration will show you all known devices instead of hiding the ones it already knows about.

If this is the first time you’ve heard about COSMIC, it’s a new desktop environment that has been taking the Linux world by storm. It saw a public stable release back in December 2025, and every major Linux distro wants it before it even turns one year old. As such, now sounds like a good time to grab COSMIC for your Linux distro and see what the hype is about.