KaOS is pleased to announce the availability of the September release of a new stable ISO.

Latest News for this ISO

For the Plasma desktop, the latest Plasma (6.4.5), KDE Gear (25.08.1), and Frameworks (6.18.0) are included. All built on Qt 6.9.2. News for KDE Gear 25.08 includes, reduced memory usage of various Akonadi resources by around 75% each, Dolphin now offers two search engines that will help you find that specific, but elusive file or folder you can’t locate (File Indexing & Simple search) and NeoChat can now create polls and open a context menu for each individual thread of messages.

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}

KCP (KaOS Community Packages) was the last part of KaOS that still used closed source git, it has now also moved to Codeberg. The manager (called kcp), was completely rewritten. First part to accommodate a full migration of all (about 370) repositories to Codeberg, second part to get better accuracy in the PKGBUILD parsing.

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.

IsoImageWriter has undergone a rewrite, it is QML based for KaOS and now does not only write an ISO file to USB, it also can download an ISO from various distributions. _{IsoImageWriter with support to download an ISO}

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, 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. 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).

Updates to the base of the system were numerous and included Libxml2 2.14.6, Git 2.51, KBD 2.9.0, OpenCV 4.12.0, OpenEXR 3.4.0, Proj 9.7.0, Poppler 25.09.0, Gstreamer 1.26.6, Pipewire 1.4.8, kernel moved to Linux 6.16.9, Systemd 254.27, ZFS 2.3.4, Meson 1.9.1, OpenSSL 3.5.3, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 32.1 and Mesa 25.2.3.

The installer (Calamares) no longer uses a web-browser on the Welcome page to link to extra information. Since the installer runs as root, opening a browser as root has always been problematic. KaOS now moved to provide the extra info by using a QML Drawer within the Welcome page.

Among the new packages included Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn, Plasma-bigscreen, a user-friendly interface designed for devices like HTPCs and SBCs connected to TVs and projectors and Hydrogen, both a drum sequencer for pattern-based programming and a drum synth. _{Plasma Bigscreen interface}

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). _{Hydrogen drum machine}

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 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.

The Linux kernel has all the needed ucode built-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 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. _{Calamares using a QML Drawer to show information}

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.