14 DAY TRIAL // KaOS 2017.02, the February release of the ISO image of KaOS, an open-source GNU/Linux distribution that offers a rolling model and is inspired by Arch Linux, has been announced today.
As its name suggests, KaOS is built around the KDE desktop environment, so it's targeted mainly at KDE fans. The new ISO image, KaOS 2017.02, ships with all the latest KDE technologies and applications, including KDE Plasma 5.9.2, KDE Applications 16.12.2, KDE Frameworks 5.31.0, and Qt 5.8.0.
"Some of the latest Qt 5/kf5 ported applications that moved into the KaOS repositories include Otter Browser, a Qt5 based web-browser, using the light-weight qtwebkit-tp as backend," reads today's announcement. "Also included is a KaOS specific tool [IsoWriter] to write ISO files to USB."
Calamares 3.1 is now the default installer
Few know that the developers behind KaOS also contribute to the popular and open-source Calamares universal installer framework that's being used as default install by many other GNU/Linux distributions, and today's KaOS 2017.02 install medium ships with Calamares 3.1, which is currently still in development.
Calamares 3.1 promises quite a bunch of improvements over the Calamares 3.0 stable series, including better checking of Internet connection availability and package manager handling, but KaOS team also managed to add a workaround that lets users use passwords that contain non-Latin1 characters.
A Plasma Wayland session has been added to the SDDM login screen if you want to use the next-generation display server with your KDE Plasma desktop environment, and it looks like the Mesa packages have been updated to include experimental Nouveau patches that allow QtWebengine-based apps and web browsers to work on PCs that use the Nouveau driver.
KaOS 2017.02 is available for download today as a Live 64-bit ISO image for those who want to install the operating system on their personal computers, as well as existing users that need to reinstall the OS. The rest of you running a healthy KaOS installation don't need to download the KaOS 2017.02 release to keep their installations up to date, but only to run the "sudo pacman -Syu" command from time to time.
