KaOS presents a February ISO with a complete change from what you expect from this distribution.
Latest News for this ISO
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. For those wondering why this change, it has come into play because of a desire to move away from Systemd. Work is ongoing to see if a move to Dinit is viable for this distribution, that also meant, looking for an alternative to Plasma, since Plasma pretty much demands Systemd, and will be fully mandatory soon. This ISO still uses Systemd fully though.
Trials to use niri with the Noctalia shell have 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.
The change for this ISO however doesn’t mean it is permanent. Plasma 6 is still fully available in the repositories. Using an ISO though for wider testing and gauging general response for such a move, was deemed a needed option.
With this ISO, Limine is now the default bootloader. Other options for UEFI installs are still available in Calamares, but Limine has replaced systemd-boot as default.
For the desktop shell, the latest niri (25.11), Noctalia (4.4), and Quickshell (0.2.1) are included. All built on Qt 6.10.2. To complete this setup, options like cliphist, seatd, ddcutil, pavucontrol-qt, qt6ct and xwayland-satellite are installed.
Welcome to a different KaOS
This ISO also moves to a newer systemd. 254 is now a few years old (still maintained upstream, but looks like that won’t be the case much longer), it was the last version fully supporting a split /usr setup like KaOS is using. Running an install on systemd 257 has been tested a while now, creating an ISO with it still fails, so this ISO has systemd 255.22, the installs will move to 257.10.
niri keymap overview
Updates to the base of the system were numerous and include a new GCC 15.2.1, Glibc 2.42 & Binutils 2.45.1 based Toolchain, Opencv 4.12.0, Poppler 26.02.0, Gstreamer 1.28, Pipewire 1.4.9, kernel moved to Linux 6.18.10, Systemd 257.10, ZFS 2.4.0, Cmake 4.2, OpenSSH 10.2, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 33.5 and Mesa 25.3.5.
Among the new packages included are niri, a Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, Quickshell, a Flexible toolkit for making desktop shells with QtQuick for Wayland and Noctalia Shell, a minimal desktop shell for Wayland that actually gets out of your way.
Overview of the niri keymap
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.
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.
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’ 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.
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.
Noctalia Settings
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
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.