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The KaOS Linux distribution is celebrating eight years of activity this month, so what better way to celebrate then with a new ISO release, KaOS 2021.04.
KaOS 2021.04 is here as the first ISO snapshot to switch to Dracut as the default tool for creating the Linux boot image (initramfs), replacing Mkinitcpio, which is no longer supported. This is a major change and requires a lot of work to be fully integrates, but, for now, the linux-next kernel defaults to Dracut for initramfs creation.
Since KaOS focuses on Qt and KDE, the KaOS 2021.04 release ships with the KDE Plasma 5.21.3 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the latest KDE Gear 21.04 and KDE Frameworks 5.81 software suites, all built against the Qt 5.15.2 open-source application framework.
“Qt 5.15 does not receive updates or maintenance from the Qt company,” said the devs in the release notes. “KDE has stepped up though and published a maintained 5.15 fork. KaOS now regularly does a patch update from this fork for all of Qt 5.15, so it basically is now at 5.15.3.”
Under the hood, KaOS 2021.04 is powered by Linux kernel 5.11.16 and features an updated toolchain consisting of GCC 10.3, GNU C Library 2.33, GNU Binutils 2.36.1, and LLVM/Clang 11.1. Also included are Mesa 21.0.3, systemd 247.6, NetworkManager 1.30.4, Samba 4.14.3, Zstd 1.4.9, Proj 8.0.0, Git 2.30.1, Protobuf 3.15, Krb5 1.19.1, and Poppler 21.04.0.
If you want to give KaOS a try, you can download the KaOS 2021.04 release right now from the official website. KaOS Linux is inspired by Arch Linux, so it follows a rolling release model where you install once and receive updates forever. Therefore, existing KaOS users need only to update their installations to receives the goodies mentioned above by running the sudo pacman -Syu command in a terminal emulator.
Last updated 3 years ago
