14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the KaOS Linux operating system have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the KaOS 2016.06 ISO image with some very exciting goodies.
First and foremost, the devs have decided to move the distribution from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series to Linux kernel 4.6, which makes it possible to fully automate the early microcode update. Furthermore, the default desktop environment has been migrated to the Beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.7.
"For users, this means no need to install any ucode package, no need to adjust bootloaders or have an extra initrd just for Microcode loading. Many modern CPUs require loading microcode before everything else, as the update causes system instability otherwise," reads today's announcement.
Qt 5.7, KDE Frameworks 5.23.0, full-disk encryption, and more
Another goodie that has made it into today's KaOS 2016.06 ISO image is the brand new Qt 5.7.0 GUI toolkit with its amazing technologies, which are perfect for a distribution running on top of the latest KDE software. Talking about KDE, the devs have also managed to add the latest KDE Application 16.04.2 software suite and the KDE Frameworks 5.23.0 collection of add-ons for Qt5.
However, probably something that most of KaOS users have expected for such a long time is full-disk encryption, which allows them to install the GNU/Linux operating system on an encrypted file system. Of course, the full-disk encryption support has been implemented in the installer via LUKS, for both the automated install and manual methods.
Now that KaOS has been moved to the latest Qt5 technologies, the time has come for the distro to drop support for Qt4. For users, this means that applications that haven't yet been ported from Qt4 to Qt5 won't be supported in KaOS anymore. VirtualBox 5.1 Beta and Kaffeine media players are the latest additions to the apps ported to Qt5 and available in the distro.
Last but not least, KaOS now uses the latest Calamarest 2.3 distribution independent installer framework. That's actually why the full-disk encryption support has been introduced, and the artwork has been revamped, as the Midna Dark theme has received a major overhaul, and there's a new icon theme that works great for both light and dark themes. A Wayland entry has been added to the login manager if you want to use KaOS on Wayland.
Download KaOS 2016.06 right now via our website.
