Tras a one-month hiatus, we already have here KaOS 2022.04, the April ISO of this distribution based on Arch Linux. It is available from Friday, and has come with important news, at least as far as applications are concerned. And it is that the KDE project releases major updates to its applications in April, August and December, and the new ISO of KaOS already has the KDE Gear 22.04 that was released at the beginning of last month.
Sometimes when changes are introduced, they are not an update or a natural evolution, but rather a replacement. This has happened with IWD, which, after almost two years of testing, has already been considered mature enough by the project to replace wpa_suplicant as the default WiFi daemon.
KaOS 2022.4 already uses Linux 5.17
Many of the new features they mentioned in the release note are related to KDE Gear 22.04, like the improvements in Konsole, Kdenlive or Okular, but also that use Plasma 5.24.4 or Frameworks 5.93, the latter in both cases. And all of that on top of Qt 5.15.3+. It also highlights that the installer offers a new option to see the slides with distribution information or see what Calamares is doing if the log view option is chosen.
As for base packages, KaOS 2022.4 includes Glib2 2.72.1, Linux 5.17.5, Systemd 250.4, Boost 1.78.0, DBus 1.14.0, Mesa 22.0.2, Vulkan 1.3.212, Util-linux 2.38, Coreutils 9.1 , Libusb 1.0.26; as optional, LibreOffice 7.3.2, Firefox 99.0.1, Chrome 103, Thunderbird 91.8, GIMP 2.10.30 0 Ardor 6.9.0. Notably LibreOffice has been replaced by Calligra as default office application. As a known issue, installation on RAID is currently not possible.
Users interested in installing KaOS 2022.04 can download the latest ISO from this link. Existing users can update with the command sudo pacman -Syu. The developer team advises disabling Secure Boot, as it is not supported.