COSMIC Epoch 1.7: Network Folders in the File Manager Finally Work Fast

System76 has released COSMIC Epoch 1.7 — the latest update to its open-source desktop environment written in Rust.

The end of a years-long SFTP saga

The most noticeable change in this release concerns the COSMIC-Files file manager. Browsing network file systems — over SFTP, for instance — now works noticeably faster than before. Behind that dry line in the changelog lies a bug report filed all the way back in 2024: users complained that the time it took to load a directory grew along with the number of files in it, while generating more network traffic than GNOME's Nautilus.

The cause turned out to be rather mundane. The COSMIC file manager (like its ancestor GNOME-Files) treated remote files exactly the same as local ones. On a local disk the extra operations are barely noticeable, but when working over a network protocol each such call turns into a separate request across the network — and loading a directory with a large number of files stretched out for a long time.

The fix, which landed in the release just last week, adds detection of remote file systems and makes it possible to avoid redundant operations for non-local files. Put simply, the manager has finally learned to understand that a file isn't sitting on the disk under your desk but somewhere on the other end of the network, and to behave accordingly.

Other fixes

Besides speeding up network access, COSMIC Epoch 1.7 includes a number of other corrections. The screen now always turns on when you unlock the computer, and the compositor zooms the image in with each key press. The full list of changes in version 1.7 has been published on GitHub.

For an environment that is still under active development, resolving such long-standing problems matters more than flashy new features: it's precisely from little things like these that the sense of a mature everyday desktop is built.

Source: Phoronix