14 DAY TRIAL // Today, November 7, 2016, the developers of the KaOS rolling GNU/Linux distribution were pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of KaOS 2016.11.
KaOS 2016.11 is the monthly respin ISO Image of the project, bringing users an up-to-date install medium for new deployments of the Linux-based operating system without having to go to all the trouble of downloading hundreds of updates from the software repositories.
Being a KDE-oriented distro, KaOS always ships with the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment, as well as KDE Applications and Frameworks suites. Therefore, KaOS 2016.11 is here to include the KDE Plasma 5.8.3 LTS desktop, KDE Applications 16.08.2 software suite, and KDE Frameworks 5.27.0 collection of add-on libraries for Qt 5.7.0.
However, it looks like KaOS 2016.11 improves the Midna theme for the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment to better support the Wayland session, with which the Aurorae-based decoration is not compatible. Also, the new ISO respin ships with three new apps, namely KShutdown, KTouch, and Now-Dock.
"For Plasma 5.8 the used Window Decoration in the Midna theme has been updated to accommodate changes in a Wayland session. Aurorae based decoration cannot be used in Wayland thus this change was needed. You will also find an updated wallpaper selection as part of the artwork changes," reads today's announcement.
Now powered by Linux kernel 4.8 with improved AMD Radeon GPU support
In some more good news for KaOS users, the KaOS 2016.11 ISO respin uses the latest Linux 4.8.6 kernel and systemd 232 init system, along with up-to-date core components and applications, such as FFmpeg 3.2, Mesa 13.0.0 3D Graphics Library, GStreamer 1.10.0, MariaDB 10.1.18, Glib2 2.50.1, and Poppler 0.48.0.
The included Linux 4.8 kernel improves support for many AMD Radeon graphics cards by using the open source AMDGPU video driver by default. Of course, there are various other small improvements in various other areas, such as the Calamares installer, which was updated to the latest version from the 2.4 stable series.
Download KaOS 2016.11 now and watch the video overview courtesy of W00den D3sk.
