KaOS - 2025.07
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.
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).
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.
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.
A new Phonon sound backend is added. 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.
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) 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.
After almost two years of testing IWD, it is now in such a good state that it has replaced Wpa_Suplicant as the default wireless daemon for KaOS. Similar, Pipewire has replaced PulseAudio as the default sound/low-level multimedia framework.
For Nvidia, longterm supported version 470xx is included, alongside the latest released version.
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.
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.
The artwork includes a custom icon theme for light themes. Midna creates a complete unified look from boot-up all the way through logout.
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.
For UEFI installs, KaOS uses the simple, transparent but quite powerful systemd-boot as bootloader.
Octopi is a crucial part of full system maintenance for KaOS. It is not just a GUI frontend to pacman. Tools like making sure a mirror is synced before starting any update, looking at the pacman logs, an option to get a paste from a complete snapshot of all info of a system with the SysInfo tool are included. Also included are very simple ways to open files, like copy to clipboard the file path shown in Octopi. To make sure the system doesn’t start using too much disk space for the pacman cache, but still giving the user the option to retain some recent packages, the cache-cleaner tool is a great addition. The built-in tool to access KCP has now a much clearer place with the addition of its own “foreign” icon in the menu-bar. When viewing package info it is now possible to click the depends of such a package. New added is the option to select custom icons for the systemtray.
For UEFI installs, KaOS uses the simple, transparent but quite powerful systemd-boot as bootloader.
To learn more about the goals and ideas behind KaOS, please read the Home and FAQ pages.
To avoid any misunderstanding and confusion, KaOS is not based upon, derived of, or inspired by any one particular distribution. It is completely independent, build entirely from scratch with its own repositories. To read more about this see Based. A rolling release distribution never has a final release, every ISO is merely a snapshot of the current status of the repositories. An idea what is currently available:
The ISO ships with Frameworks 6.14.0, Plasma 6.4.3, KDE Applications 25.04.3, Linux 6.15.7, Systemd 254.27, Kmod 34, NetworkManager 1.52.1, Calligra 25.04.3, Elisa, Xorg-Server 1.21.18, Mesa 25.1.6, Glibc 2.41, GCC 14.2.1, non-free Nvidia 575 and Python3 3.11.13 to name a few.
The package manager is Pacman 7.0.0, with the simple but powerful Octopi 0.17.0 as GUI frontend. Falkon is the default, Qt based, web browser. GFXboot is included with KaOS artwork, Grub theme is Midna, Look & Feel is a KaOS exclusive version Midna.
Repositories of KaOS will stay limited in size and expect it to stay at the current maximum of about 2100-2200 packages. A gist of what is available, besides the stable kernel there is Linux-next 6.15, VLC, Vokoscreen, Blender, Kodi, Calibre, Sigil, Vulkan packages, a few games like 0ad and Knights. A limited number of the most well-known GTK applications are available, for example, Firefox 141, Chrome 140, Ardour 8.12.0, Inkscape 1.4, GIMP 3.0.4 and Thunderbird 141. Complete language packs are available for KDE, Calligra, Firefox, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. For IM, Fcitx 51.14 is available as a rather complete group.
Known issues:
- Installing on RAID is currently not possible
To create reliable installation media, please follow the instructions from the Download page. KaOS’s ISO’s do not support Unetbootin or Rufus, and DVDs need a burn speed no higher than 4x.