Nate Drake seeks to find some order in KaOS – a distro incorporating the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment.
KaOS is an independently developed distro, though its design is inspired by Arch Linux. Originally released as KdeOS in 2013, it has since changed its name and follows a rolling release model.
The OS is designed solely for the x86_64-bit architecture and exclusively uses Qt (currently version 6.6.1) as well as the latest version of KDE.
KaOS 2024.01 is the first stable release to incorporate the Plasma 6 desktop environment. It now also comes with an overhauled version of the OS’s own Midna theme.
In the runup to release, KaOS developers have been shipping all ported applications from their Frameworks 6 branch into snapshot ISOs. Most bundled apps are now available as a Frameworks 6/Plasma 6 port. For those apps that are not ready, Frameworks 5 is still packaged, so they can be used in a Plasma 6 environment.
The display manager can run in Wayland mode, so KaOS is closer to being ready to move away from X11.
If you fire up the 2.7GB ISO, you’ll also note that setup is handled by the user-friendly Calamares installer, which now supports automatic partitioning of popular filesystems like XFS, ext4, Btrfs and ZFS. When we took KaOS for a test spin in a virtual machine, we were also pleased to see the OS can be booted in live mode.
On first launch, we also had a chance to view the built-in Guide, which is well laid out, although some of the grammar and spelling is dubious. The online documentation also contains a quaint warning against using a dial-up connection to download ISOs. During our tests in a virtual machine, the Calamares installer crashed when we tried to proceed with install.
Staying in live mode, we quickly moved to the Application Launcher. It’s here we discovered that given that it’s available as a pure Qt6/kf6 application, LibreOffice has now replaced Calligra as KaOS’s default office suite.
If you do succeed with setup, KaOS’s very own Croeso (Welsh for ‘welcome’) launches post-install. Written in QML, this handy tool lets you adjust some 15 commonly used settings, including viewing your distribution info, and select packages from no fewer than six different grou
