The independent development team behind KaOS Linux distribution has initiated 2024 with a new ISO release that unveils the first purely Plasma 6-based environment for a pre-launch experience of the much-anticipated KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment set to be released later this month.
“What you will see on this ISO is a pure Plasma 6 based environment.”
KDE Plasma 6 is on the brink of its release, pledging new features and enhancements from this February 28th, 2024. However, KaOS Linux developers are leading the movement with their Arch Linux-inspired distro, releasing a new ISO today featuring the second Release Candidate (RC) version of Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear 24.02.
“Roughly fifteen months ago, we initiated a comprehensive migration to a Frameworks 6, Plasma 6 based distribution,” voiced the developers. “KaOS, however, has consistently shipped all ported applications from their Frameworks 6 branch in its multiple snapshot ISO releases to prepare for this transition. With this move, almost all applications that users are familiar with in a Frameworks 5 / Plasma 5 version are now accessible in a Frameworks 6 / Plasma 6 port.”
Though Plasma 6 will be launched on February 28th, it might be a while before most rolling-release distributions such as Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed are able to package it and distribute the considerable update to the users. However, should you be eager to try it before that, you can download and install KaOS Linux 2024.01 right now and update your system until February 28th to be the initial user of KDE Plasma 6.
In case your favored applications aren’t fully prepared for Plasma 6, KaOS Linux is also supplied with KDE Frameworks 5 so you can still run them in the KDE Plasma 6 environment. That said, the developers have pointed out that applications dependent on parts from KDE Plasma 5 won’t be included in the KaOS repositories until these have been converted and are ready for everyday usage.
Behind the scenes, the KaOS Linux 2024.01 release operates on the long-term support Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series. It also includes a variety of updated components such as FFmpeg 6, the 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.
Last updated 2 hours ago