Halcyon 0.2.0

Desktop widgets and themes for COSMIC on Pop!_OS 24.04.

Download for 64-bit Intel/AMD PCs ·
Source ·
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What's new

Add Frosted, Clear glass, Smoked glass and Liquid materials for widgets,
with shared or per-surface finishes, transparency, tint and readable text.
Dock and panel materials require the updated active Islands companion,
including when using its ordinary Native layout.
Preserve Liquid widget motion in saved setups and semantic Undo.
Qualify Islands on reviewed 1.10/1.11 sources with bounded startup probes,
stock fallback and local rounded frosting without changing global frosting.
Fix Projects reading stale legacy settings instead of the current Halcyon
configuration, including custom XDG locations and explicit overrides.
Introduce automatic daily activity reporting while desktop widgets run.
Reports contain a random installation ID, app version, first country
and schema; no widget content is sent. Reporting has no opt-out setting.
Cache approximate country from Country.is without retaining IP addresses.
Explain reporting in first-run setup, App settings and privacy
documentation.

Materials

Appearance offers Frosted, Clear glass, Smoked glass and Liquid, with shared or
per-surface choices, transparency, tint, Widget readability and Undo. Liquid has
optional brief widget edge motion; native bar highlights stay static. Materials
preserve your color choices. They do not provide optical refraction or a blur-strength
slider. The four native comparisons and chooser are in the
README.

Daily activity reporting

Starting with 0.2.0, Halcyon sends automatic daily activity reports while
the desktop widgets run. Reports go to Google and contain a random installation ID, app
version, approximate first country and report format version. Country.is supplies
the country from the public IP; Halcyon discards the IP. No widget content is sent. Reporting is
always on and has no settings toggle, including after upgrading.
Privacy details.

Install or update

Download the main package above, then run:

sudo apt install ./cosmic-ext-halcyon_0.2.0_amd64.deb

Open Halcyon from the application launcher. Installing the package alone
does not change your desktop or start the widgets. Existing settings are
preserved when updating.

Updates currently use downloads from GitHub Releases. This package does not
add an APT repository or enable automatic updates.

Updating Islands

For Islands layouts or Dock/Panel glass materials, also install the matching
add-on package from this release:

Companion package ·
Full corresponding source

sudo apt install ./cosmic-ext-halcyon-islands_0.2.0_amd64.deb
halcyon-islands enable

Then log out and back in. The enable step refreshes your per-user copy;
installing the package alone does not update that copy or restart the panel.
The add-on checks reviewed COSMIC source combinations and performs bounded startup
checks. Unknown sources or failed checks select the stock panel; saved layouts are kept.
Widget materials work without the add-on. Bar materials need this updated active
companion even when the bars use Native layout.

Before you start

Platform: Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC on 64-bit Intel or AMD PCs.
amd64 means x86-64 and supports both manufacturers; this is not an ARM build.
Google Calendar: Sign-in is not configured in this build. Other widgets work without a Google account.
Islands: optional, distributed separately, and qualified for reviewed COSMIC
1.10/1.11 source combinations. The 1.10 checks used its compositor with host
libraries/applets, not a clean 1.10 OS. Unknown future sources need validation.
Compatibility, activation and removal.
Checksums: download the matching .sha256 file beside your package
and check it with sha256sum -c filename.sha256.