A new First Run Wizard dialog has been added as well

Sep 13, 2016 22:10 GMT  ·  By

Today, September 13, 2016, the KaOS development team had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of a new, updated installation medium of their KaOS Linux computer operating system.

KaOS 2016.09 is the latest stable ISO image of the GNU/Linux distribution, and it brings quite a lot of interesting things. For starters, it appears to be the first to offer a Beta preview of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, which comes accompanied by the latest KDE Applications 16.08.1 software suite and KDE Frameworks 5.26.0 collection of 70 add-on libraries for Qt 5.7.0.

Of course, this comes as a big surprise for us, because the Beta milestone of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS is yet to be announced upstream, and it should be available for us mortals on September 15, 2016. However, the KaOS developers have managed to integrate it into their new ISO build by using the latest Git commits from upstream, something like the KDE Neon project is currently doing to offer you the latest KDE technologies.

"With this ISO KaOS has gone back to a fully integrated build of the different KDE parts. Instead of building Frameworks, Plasma and KDE Applications on their own separate release schedules all are now build the same day of any Frameworks release," reads today's announcement. "To accomplish this Plasma 5 is now build from the latest commits, no longer uses released tars."

New tool to write ISO images to USB sticks

As mentioned before, KaOS 2016.09 is full of new things, and the list of changes continues with a new First Run Wizard dialog that lets users configure various aspects of their newly installed KaOS Linux operating system, including the mouse behavior, desktop wallpaper, menu launcher, color scheme, desktop theme, widget style, the number of virtual desktops, as well as window decoration.

There's also a new tool called ISO Writer, which will make installing ISO images on USB flash drives a breeze from now on. Of course, the latest software versions have been included as well, and among the most important ones, we can mention Linux kernel 4.7.3, systemd 231, Python 3.5.2, GStreamer 1.8.3, FFMpeg 3.1.3, MariaDB 10.1.17, Protobuf 3.0.2, Poppler 0.47.0, and Boost 1.61.0. Lastly, Qt4 is no longer supported in KaOS.

You can download KaOS 2016.09 right now via our website, but being a rolling release and all that, you don't need to download anything if you have a healthy KaOS installation on your personal computer and all you want is to keep it up to date. For that, use the integrated package manager and apply all available software updates. KaOS 2016.09 is here only for new installations.

ISO Writer tool
ISO Writer tool

KaOS 2016.09 (3 Images)

First Run Wizard
ISO Writer toolSDDM login manager
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