System76 refresh the Adder WS laptop, plus COSMIC desktop Alpha in May

Some exciting news for System76 fans here as not only have they now released the powerful refresh of the Adder WS laptop, but their COSMIC desktop environment is also approaching an Alpha release.

First up, the Adder WS, what System76 call their "career-starter of a laptop" with a HX-class Intel i9 CPU (now 14th Gen), NVIDIA 40 Series graphics, DDR5 RAM and PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage and Pop!_OS preinstalled. Starting at $1,749 it should cover pretty much everything you could need:

• Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU.
• Up to NVIDIA RTX 4070 graphics, RTX 4050 base model.
• Up to 96GB RAM, 16GB DDR5 base model.
• 1080p matte display, 144Hz refresh rate.
• Up to 12TB storage, 500GB PCIe4 M.2 SSD base model.
• 2 USB-A, 2 USB-C, HDMI, and headset jack.

See more on the System76 store.

Additionally they announced in a blog post that their COSMIC desktop now has an Alpha version due sometime in late May, after missing their initial plan for the end of Q1 and two alpha releases are currently planned. They're finishing up their Terminal and Text Editor, with significant progress on Files and the Application Store also done. 

Font rendering quality was also improved, especially for dark text on a light background which they said is "thanks to the upstream iced toolkit’s new color management" (iced is a cross-platform GUI library for Rust) and that "The web-colors feature uses the same methods to render colors as web browsers":

Pictured: Image comparing font rendering quality in light mode between COSMIC Edit with (right) and without (left) iced's web-colors color management feature.

Numerous parts of COSMIC are finished including hybrid graphics support, minimize and restore, wallpapers, a tiling applet, input device settings and so on. Some other new recent additions include theming support for dark mode, light mode and user-configured accent colours.

The full release of the COSMIC desktop is still on target for later this year along with Pop!_OS 24.04.