Recently se announced the release of the new version of KaOS 2022.02, which is a rolling release distribution intended to provide a desktop based on recent KDE releases and applications that use Qt.
For those unaware of Shirt they should know that this is a distribution that was created by Anke “Demm” Boersma, who initially worked on Chrakra Linux. KaOS unlike other distros was developed from ceror. According to its developers, its goal to be more differentiated. These include a limited selection of applications or exclusive support for 64-bit architecture.
KaOS is characterized by being a Linux distribution independent which includes the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other popular software programs that use the Qt toolkit.
It was originally based on Arch LinuxBut since April 2013, developers started creating their own packages, which are now available from KaOS's own warehouse.
The packaging is managed by the team itself, only for the stable versions, and controlled by the Pacman installer. KaOS uses a Rolling Relase publishing development model and it is only available for 64-bit systems.
Main news of KaOS 2022.02
In this new version of the distribution that is presented we can find that by default, a KDE session based on the Wayland protocol is enabled.
Although it should be clarified that Wayland is not going well at all, but it has had great improvements, because due to problems with Wayland support, the SMplayer media player was replaced by Haruna, which is also a plugin for MPV. Of the additional features, the integration with yt-dlp to download YouTube videos stands out.
Other changes that were made in this new version were in the office suite, instead of Calligra, since now LibreOffice is proposed by default with a rendering backend based on Qt5/kf5.
On the other hand, it is mentioned that during installation the Calamares installer now shows warnings when conflicts are detected when partitioning disk partitions.
It is also noted that it has been introduced a new interface for configuring monitors, the process of moving panels to different parts of the screen has been simplified and a new overview mode has been included for viewing the content of virtual desktops and evaluating search results in KRunner.
In addition to that, it also includes a new calendar scheduler, Kalendar, which provides task and event management tools and integrates with external calendars based on Nextcloud, Google Calendar, Outlook and Caldav.
While on the part of the desktop components that have been updated in this new version of KaOS 2022.02 are mentioned to: KDE Plasma 5.24, KDE Frameworks 5.91.0, KDE Gear 21.12.2 and Qt 6.2.3 (Qt 5.15.3 is also available, maintained by the KDE project).
Other updated software versions highlighted in this new release include Glibc 2.33, GCC 11.2, Perl 5.34.0, PHP 8.1.2, GStreamer 1.20.0, Linux kernel 5.15.23, Systemd 250.3, Curl 7.81.0. 21.3.6, Mesa 1.20.0, Wayland 1.9.9, Sudo 2.6.1, and Openldap XNUMX.
Finally for those interested in knowing more about it about this launch, you can check the details within the official announcement In the following link.
Download KaOS 2022.02
Finally, if you don't have KaOS installed on your computer yet and you want to download and install this Linux distribution focused on the KDE desktop environment on your computer or you want to test it under a virtual machine.
You just have to go to the official website of the distribution and in its download section you can get the system image. The link is this.
You can save the downloaded image to a USB device with the help of the Etcher application.
Si you are already a KaOS user, you must have received these updates in the last few days. But if you don't know if you already have them installed, just open a terminal and run the following commands in it:
sudo pacman -Syuu
With this, you only have to accept the updates if they exist and I recommend restarting your computer.