KaOS is pleased to announce the availability of the July release of a new stable ISO. For the Plasma desktop, the latest Plasma (6.1.3), KDE Gear (24.05.2), and Frameworks (6.4.0) are included. All built on Qt 6.7.2. Among the many changes included in Plasma 6.1, is that you can now start up a remote desktop directly from the System Settings app, once enabled, you can connect to the remote desktop using a client such as KRDC. For customizing the visual aspect of Edit Mode has been overhauled and you will now see a slick animation when you activate it. The entire desktop zooms out smoothly, giving you a better overview of what is going on and allowing you to make your changes with ease. On Wayland now has a feature that remembers what you were doing in your last session as it did under X11.

###### New Plasma 6.1 Edit Mode

More applications are now ready to use Qt6 and Frameworks 6 including Kooka, Qdirstat, KWave and Kaffeine

Support has been added to install with the all-new filesystem bcachefs, it is still in experimental stage, but is included in the kernel build, and the needed bcachefs-tools are available in the repositories. Calamares can use bcachefs when used in manual mode, though no specific settings for this filesystem have been implemented yet. Updates to the base of the system included a move to LLVM/Clang 18.1.8, Libgcrypt 1.11.0, Nettle 3.10, kernel moved to Linux 6.9.9, Systemd 253.22, Dracut 103, Pipewire 1.2.1, OpenSSL 3.3, OpenCV 4.10.0, OpenSSH 98.p1 and Mesa 24.1.4.

A new Phonon sound backend is in use. So far VLC was used, but there is no Qt6 porting for VLC yet. Using phonon-mpv as default now, gives a fully Qt 6 ready backend.

Four years after being end of life, GTK2 is finally removed from the KaOS repositories. The one major application left that still required GTK2 was Ardour, but with 8.4.0, an internal YTK is used, thus GTK2 is now gone.

Among the new packages included is Marknote, a nicely in Plasma 6 integrated note management application.

SDDM 0.20.0 added the option to run this display manager in Wayland mode, so KaOS is one step closer to being ready to move away from X11. The shell used to run in Wayland mode is kwin_wayland (upstream default is using Weston).

The automated partitioning option in the installer (Calamares) now offers the use of all popular filesystems, so no need to use manual partitioning to be able to choose XFS, EXT4, BTRFS, or ZFS.

Big thanks goes to YourHostingSolutions for not only providing a mirror but also providing a server for KaOS. With the discontinuation of Fosshost, a new server was sorely needed.

Getting good logs has always been a bit of a challenge since you have to know what journalctl commands to use. That is now a thing of the past, Kjournald gives the option to view the logs from a nice GUI, with all kinds of filter options in the left-hand pane (it is part of the default install)

Common Notes

The Linux kernel has all the needed ucode build-in for a fully automated Early Microcode update.

KaOS uses the Systemd-provided Systemd-boot for UEFI installs. Since LibreOffice 6.2, it is now possible to supply this as a pure Qt6/kf6 application. LibreOffice has thus replaced Calligra as the default Office Application for KaOS.

KaOS’ creation Croeso (Welsh for welcome) for helping with configuring a new install is included. It will run on the newly installed system and offers to adjust some 15 commonly used settings, includes a custom Wallpaper selector, distribution info, and the option to select packages to install from six different groups. It is written in QML and fits well with the Welcome application used in the Live system. The latter includes an Installation Guide.

This ISO uses the CRC and finobt enabled XFS filesystem as default. CRCs enable enhanced error detection due to hardware issues, whilst the format changes also improves crash recovery algorithms and the ability of various tools to validate and repair metadata corruptions when they are found. The free inode btree does not index used inodes, allowing faster, more consistent inode allocation performance as filesystems age. The artwork includes custom icon themes for light and dark themes. Midna creates a complete unified look from boot-up all the way through logout.

There is an option to verify the authenticity of downloaded KaOS ISO files through GPG signature verification, see the Download page for further details and instructions.

Known issues:

• Installing on RAID is currently not possible

To create reliable installation media, please follow the instructions from the Download page. KaOS ISO’s do not support Unetbootin or Rufus, and DVDs need a burn speed no higher than 4x.