KaOS 2025.09, 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 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 (4 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, powered by the SDDM display manager, now has an option to run in Wayland mode. When running in Wayland, the kwin_wayland compositing manager is used instead of the default 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:
- The desktop components have been updated to Qt 6.9.2, KDE Frameworks 6.18.0, KDE Plasma 6.4.5, and KDE Gear 25.08.1. The KaOS Plasma Midna theme has been redesigned, featuring a new icon set, a redesigned splash screen, and a new login screen. Window decorations have been updated, and a new color scheme has been implemented.
- The interface for installing additional KCP (KaOS Community Packages) software has been rewritten. Around 370 KCP package repositories have been migrated to the Codeberg collaborative development service.
- Initial support for using Plasma-login-manager instead of the SDDM login manager has been added. SDDM will be replaced with Plasma-login-manager in the future.
- The IsoImageWriter utility has been rewritten, which can now not only write ISO images to USB drives, but also download ISO images of various distributions.
- KDE Frameworks packages based on Qt5 have been removed from the repository. Qt5 libraries have been excluded from the core distribution since the June update, but remain available for installation from the repositories.
- Updated package versions: kernel Linux 6.16, Libxml2 2.14.6, Git 2.51, KBD 2.9.0, OpenCV 4.12.0, OpenEXR 3.4.0, Proj 9.7.0, Poppler 25.09.0, Gstreamer 1.26.6, Pipewire 1.4.8, systemd 254.27, ZFS 2.3.4, Meson 1.9.1, OpenSSL 3.5.3, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 32.1 and Mesa 25.2.3.
- The Calamares installer no longer uses the browser to generate the welcome login page. A QML Drawer-based component is now used to display information.
- Added the Typst package (a typesetting and layout system developed as an alternative to LaTeX, but offering a simple and intuitive syntax in the style of MediaWiki and MarkDown).
- Added the Plasma Bigscreen package (an interface based on KDE technologies for multimedia devices and TVs).
- Added the Hydrogen package (drum machine for creating rhythmic music).
Source: opennet.ru
