Every Intel-based System76 laptop ships day one with Coreboot firmware preinstalled. The System76 firmware interface is also written in Rust using Redox libraries.
It will launch when it's ready, using 24.04 as the base.
The next Pop!_OS release will use COSMIC as its desktop environment instead of GNOME. There will be an upgrade path, same as in previous releases.
The Appearance panel in Settings, where you may also create a custom theme.
Depends on what you are wanting to configure. To configure displays, use wdisplay. I personally use the system defaults.
It's already very usable in its current state, and most of the tooling is complete for libcosmic. Application development will be even faster than what was needed for libcosmic.
Since around June/July.
The cosmic-greeter package is already installable today. It will work on any system that has greetd available. The Appearance panel in COSMIC Settings is not yet merged, but it is in the appearance staging branch.
The desktop environment doesn't control how applications look or function. Regarding theming, GTK3 applications need a GTK3 theme, GTK4 applications need a GTK4 theme, libadwaita applications need a libadwaita theme, and KDE applications need a KDE theme. Our tooling for generating themes will attempt to generate themes for other toolkits, but COSMIC applications have a different design language than GNOME or KDE applications.
The dock is hidden by default and appears when pressure is applied. It is also optional. Was that the only concern?
Synthetic benchmarks written in Rust are as fast as those in C. In practice, Rust applications are more efficient than their C counterparts. The performance and efficiency is nice, but the main benefit will be stable software that is free of vulnerabilities caused by common mistakes in C and C++. Virtually every Curl vulnerability would not happen in Rust.
There's half of a century of programming language theory research between C++ and Rust. Which solves many of the issues in programming that are common in C and C++. Such as the memory and thread safety violations that can be difficult to diagnose, application crashes, and critical software vulnerabilities.
The language concepts and compiler features also prevent a lot of common logical mistakes a programmer may make. Such that the best practices in C++ are the baseline for any Rust project that successfully compiles. It is easy to develop highly parallel and asynchronous software that just works and is easy to maintain and debug. As a result, you may notice Rust projects developing to maturity much quicker than you'd expect.
You can ask on the System76 subreddit