KaOS 2025.01, a rolling release distribution aimed at delivering a desktop experience based on the latest KDE releases and Qt-based applications, has been released. Its distinctive design features include a vertical panel on the right side of the screen. The distribution is being developed with Arch in mind. Linux, but maintains its own independent repository (https://writewithharper.com/), which contains over 1500 packages, and also offers a number of its own graphical utilities. XFS is used as the default file system. Builds are published for x86_64 systems (3.5 GB).
Features of KaOS:
- On UEFI systems, systemd-boot is used to boot.
- For writing ISO files to USB drives, the IsoWriter interface is provided, which supports checking the correctness of the recorded images.
- The default office package is LibreOffice, compiled with the kf5 and Qt5 VCL plugins, which allow you to use native KDE and Qt dialogs, buttons, window frames and widgets.
- A Croeso login welcome screen is provided, providing basic settings that may need to be changed after installation, as well as allowing you to install applications and view information about the distribution and system.
- By default, the XFS file system is enabled with integrity check (CRC) enabled and a separate btree index of free inodes (finobt).
- An option is available to verify downloaded ISO files against digital signatures.
- The login screen, which is powered by the SDDM display manager, now has an option to run in Wayland mode, which will allow you to stop using X11 components in the future. When using Wayland, the kwin_wayland composite manager is used instead of the standard Weston.
- In the installer (Calamares), in the automatic partitioning mode, it is possible to select file systems (XFS, EXT4, BTRFS and ZFS) without switching to manual partitioning mode.
- The Phonon sound library, which is used to work with sound devices in KDE, uses the phonon-mpv backend by default, which supports Qt 6 (the old VLC-based backend has not yet been ported to Qt6).
In the new version:
- Desktop components have been updated to Qt 6.8.1, KDE Frameworks 6.10.0, KDE Plasma 6.2 and KDE Gear 24.12.
- The following applications have been adapted to work in the environment based on Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6: Krusader, Kstars, Kmymoney, Mixxx, Photoflare, Skrooge and Liquidshell.
- Updated package versions: kernel Linux 6.12.11, Systemd 253.30, Mesa 24.3.4, SQLite 3.48.0, Rsync 3.4.1, DBUS 1.16.0, LLVM/Clang 19.1.7, Poppler 25.01.0, Gstreamer 1.24.11, Fwupd 2.0.4, ZFS 2.3.0, Tzdata 2025a, OpenSSL 3.4, FFmpeg 7.1, Protobuf 29.3.
- Added packages with Zen Browser (based on Firefox) and Harper spell checker.
Source: opennet.ru
