Release Notes

KaOS - Dinit

It is with great pleasure to present to you a Release Candidate KaOS ISO that is fully Dinit-based

Latest News for this ISO

For those interested in the reason why all these changes, please read Systemd and the future of KaOS.

A move away from systemd as init system is completed. KaOS now uses dinit > turnstile > seatd for the system startup, seats & services. This does not mean the system is systemd free, udev & tmpfiles of systemd are still in use and will be used for the foreseeable future. Elogind is in use, though not for system login, but purely for a functional polkit.

A new displaymanager is also in use, greetd with tuigreet has replaced sddm. Greetd fully integrates with seatd, so is a better fit for KaOS in the new setup.

Before anything else, those wishing to look at KaOS in VirtualBox, make sure to understand that VirtualBox does not support Wayland yet, it is still an X11-only app. The only way to workaround this is to use 3d in your settings. Plus VBoxVGA (also X11 only) can’t be used for display, you will need to use VMSVGA, and in CLI set the 3d option: VBoxManage modifyvm <vm_name> --accelerate3d on. If this is not an option for you, please do not try to use KaOS in VirtualBox, it cannot boot. You will have to wait for VirtualBox to come with Wayland.

You will not find Plasma or Kwin on this ISO, though KaOS has always been a KDE/Plasma only distribution.
Instead, you will find a Niri/Noctalia based system. Work is now very much complete to move to Dinit, see the above linked news article as to why Plasma is not the best option when moving away from systemd.
Using Niri with the Noctalia shell has proven to be a nice option. Using these means, KaOS can stay a Qt focused distribution. This ISO is still GTK free, still ships QT/KDE based applications.
Plasma 6 is still fully available in the repositories.

With this ISO, Limine is now the default bootloader. Other options for UEFI installs are still available in Calamares. Systemd-boot is no longer an option.

For the desktop shell, the latest niri (26.04)and Noctalia (v5-alpha). All built on Qt 6.11.1. To complete this setup, options like cliphist, brightnessctl, ddcutil, pavucontrol-qt, qt6ct and xwayland-satellite are installed.

The installer, Calamares, is now fully ready to run on a pure Wayland system. Changes were needed for the QML modules to have the option to input text again (as is needed in the user creation module, for example).

Updates to the base of the system were numerous and include a new Coreutils 9.11, Libgcrypt 1.12.2, Nano 9.0, Curl 8.20, OpenCV 4.13.0, Poppler 26.06.0, GStreamer 1.28, Pipewire 1.6.6, kernel moved to Linux 7.0.11, Dinit 022.0, ZFS 2.4.2, CMake 4.3, OpenSSH 10.3, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 35 and Mesa 26.1.2.

Among the new packages included are dinit, turnstile, greetd, tuigreet & corrosion. And starship, a minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell, is added to replace powerline. 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.

The automated partitioning option in the installer (Calamares) offers the use of all popular file-systems, 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.

IWD 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 580xx 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 file-system 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 file-systems age.

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 Limine 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 niri & Noctalia, Linux 7.0.11, Dinit 0.22.0, Kmod 34.2, NetworkManager 1.56, Calligra 26.04, Elisa, Xorg-Server 21.1.23, Mesa 26.1, Glibc 2.42, GCC 15.2.1, non-free Nvidia 595, and Python3 3.11.15, to name a few.

The package manager is Pacman 7.0.0, with the simple but powerful Octopi 0.18.0 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 7.1, 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 151, Chrome 151, Ardour 9.7.0, Inkscape 1.4, GIMP 3.2.4 and Thunderbird 151. Complete language packs are available for KDE, Calligra, Firefox, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. For IM, Fcitx 5.1.19 is available as a rather complete group.

Known issues:

  • Installing on RAID is currently not possible
  • For BIOS installs, XFS filesystem is not an option, GRUB fails to install with latest XFS
  • VirtualBox ONLY supports Wayland when 3d is enabled, thus only VMSVGA can be used
  • Polkit is not fully ported to Turnstile/seatd yet, so some privelege escalation options will not work.

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