It is a great pleasure to present to you the July release of a new stable ISO.

There are some major changes to this distribution with this release, both in packages provided and visual.

The KaOS Plasma Midna theme has undergone a complete overhaul, this included a new icon set, changes in the Login and Ksplash screen, new default wallpaper, modernized window decoration and color scheme.

_{Midna Ksplash}

Qt5 has been end of life for quite a few years now, but the move of all applications to Qt6 has been slow-going. With this ISO though it is finally at a point that a default install will be Qt5 free from now on. Completely gone now from the repositories are KDE Frameworks Qt5 based, this meant moving a few KDE applications to the upcoming 25.08 (now in Beta), to ensure those could be built with Qt6 support (examples are ktouch, oktetata and kqtquickcharts). Qt5 has not yet been removed from the repositories, so it is still possible to add Qt5 based applications after the installation, those won’t have any KDE libraries support though (but complete Qt5 removal is planned for the near future).

_{Ktouch Qt6 based}

Also new is Plasma 6.4, a smoother, friendlier and more helpful desktop experience, Highlights of this version include more flexible tiling, with the option to choose a different tile layout for each of your virtual desktops. The Wayland session in Plasma 6.4 brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard’s number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out. The file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going, and how long it will take to complete. For Spectacle, the built-in app for screenshots and screen recordings, the quality has been massively improved for screen recordings using the WebM format or taken on screens using fractional scaling. Support has started for a Plasma based replacement of the login manager SDDM. Plasma-login-manager is included in the repositories, not yet shipped as default on this ISO, but expect it to fully replace SDDM soon.

_{Plasma 6.4 with New! tag added in Application Launcher}

Updates to the base of the system were numerous and included a Glib2 2.84.3, Perl 5.40.2, Curl 8.15.0 , SQLite 3.50.3, CMake 4.0, IWD 3.9, Shadow 4.18.0 Poppler 25.07.0, Gstreamer 1.26.4, Pipewire 1.4.6, kernel moved to Linux 6.15.7, Systemd 254.27, ZFS 2.3.2, Tzdata 2025b, OpenSSL 3.5.1, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 31.0 and Mesa 25.1.6.

For the Plasma desktop, the latest Plasma (6.4.3), KDE Gear (25.04.3), and Frameworks (6.16.0) are included. All built on Qt 6.9.1.

Among the new packages included is Amarok, after a long absence due to no upstream maintenance, it is back in the KaOS repositories as a Qt6-Kf6 based application. Also new is plasma-keyboard a virtual keyboard based on Qt Virtual Keyboard designed to integrate in Plasma. _{Calamares using plasma-keyboard}

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 Qt6-ready backend.

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). _{Amarok Qt6 based}

The automated partitioning option in the installer (Calamares) 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.

KaOS’ creation Croeso (Welsh for welcome) for helping with configuring a new installation 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 installer Calamares} The artwork includes a custom icon theme for light 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.