KaOS Linux 2024.01 Released with a Pure KDE Plasma 6-Based Environment

This release ships with the second Release Candidate of KDE Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear 24.02.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
KaOS Linux 2024

The development team behind the independently developed KaOS Linux distribution has kicked off 2024 with a new ISO release that brings you the first pure Plasma 6-based environment for you to try ahead of the launch of the highly-anticipated KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment later this month.

“What you will see on this ISO is a pure Plasma 6 based environment.”

KDE Plasma 6 is almost here and we will all be able to enjoy its new features and improvements starting February 28th, 2024, but KaOS Linux devs are ahead of the game with their Arch Linux-inspired distro and are shipping today a new ISO running the second Release Candidate (RC) version of Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear 24.02.

“Almost fifteen months ago work started to fully migrate to a Frameworks 6, Plasma 6 based distribution, said the devs. “KaOS though has been shipping all ported applications from their Frameworks 6 branch in the many snapshot ISOs it has released to get ready for this migration. Just about all applications that users have become used to seeing in a Frameworks 5 / Plasma 5 version are available as a Frameworks 6 / Plasma 6 port.”

Even if Plasma 6 will be released on February 28th, it will take a while for most rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed to package it and push the massive update to users. But if you can’t wait until then, you can download and install KaOS Linux 2024.01 right now and update your installation up until February 28th to be the first to run KDE Plasma 6.

If your favorite applications are not ready yet for Plasma 6, KaOS Linux also ships with KDE Frameworks 5 to allow you to use them in the KDE Plasma 6 environment. On the other hand, the devs said that apps that rely on parts of KDE Plasma 5 won’t be available on the KaOS repos until they’ve been ported and ready for daily use.

Under the hood, the KaOS Linux 2024.01 release is powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series and features various updated components including FFmpeg 6, Boost 1.83.0/ICU 74.1 stack, LLVM/Clang 17.0.6, systemd 254.9, Python 3.10.13, Util-Linux 2.39.3, IWD 2.13, MariaDB 11, and Postgresql 16.

Download KaOS 2024.01

Last updated 3 months ago

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