KaOS 2025.05 has been released, a rolling release distribution aimed at providing a desktop based on the latest KDE releases and applications using Qt. Specific design features include the placement of a vertical panel on the right side of the screen. The distribution is being developed with an eye on Arch Linux, but maintains its own independent repository with over 1500 packages, and offers a number of its own graphical utilities. XFS is used as the default file system. Builds are published for x86_64 systems (3.8 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 6.9, KDE Frameworks 6.14.0, KDE Plasma 6.3.5 and KDE Gear 25.04.
- The Qt5 libraries have been excluded from the basic delivery, but they are still available for installation from the repositories. Frescobaldi, Krita, Kamoso and Calligraplan applications have been adapted for work in the Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 based environment.
- Updated package versions: Linux kernel 6.14, Systemd 254.24, Mesa 25.1.1, Glibc 2.4.1, Binutils 2.44, GCC 14.2.1, SQlite 3.49.1, Pacman 7.0.0, kmod 34.2, IWD 3.4, Poppler 25.05.0, Gstreamer 1.26.1, Pipewire 1.4.3, ZFS 2.3.2, Tzdata 2025b, OpenSSL 3.5.0, Proj 9.6.0, Protobuf 31.0.
- The package includes the Nextcloud-client package with a client implementation for synchronizing data with the Nextcloud cloud.
- Added Kjournald program with a graphical interface for navigating through systemd-journald logs.
- Added experimental support for the Bcachefs file system, which can be selected in the installer when using manual mode for working with disk partitions. Bcachefs support is included in the kernel, but requires the installation of the bcachefs-tools package from the repositories.
Source: opennet.ru
