On February 15, after three months of development, the release of the 2026.02 distribution took place. KaOS – an independent Linux distribution created from scratch, focused on utilizing Wayland, Qt, and KDE technologies.
KaOS uses a "floating" package update system (its more than 2000) and pacman from the Arch Linux project for package management.
Prior to this version, KDE Plasma was used as the desktop environment in KaOS.
Key Changes:
- The transition to using a compositing window manager Niri, a toolkit for creating desktop shells Quickshell and the environment Noctalia.
- Using Limine as the default OS bootloader instead of systemd-boot.
- Many updates to core system components, including Linux 6.18.10, systemd 257.10, ZFS 2.4.0, Pipewire 1.4.9, Glibc 2.42, GCC 15.2.1, Binutils 2.45.1, OpenCV 4.12.0, Poppler 26.02.0, Gstreamer 1.28, CMake 4.2, OpenSSH 10.2, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 33.5, and Mesa 25.3.5.
- The Calamares installer no longer uses a web browser on the welcome page for additional information. Since the installer runs as root, opening a browser with root privileges has always been problematic. Now, additional information is provided on the welcome page using QML Drawer.
- For multimedia stream processing, VLC is now used by default instead of Phonon MPV backend.
- In SDDM 0.20.0, the ability to run this display manager in Wayland mode has been added, bringing KaOS one step closer to abandoning X11.
- And other changes.
Source: linux.org.ru
