KaOS is a desktop Linux distribution that features the latest version of the

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

desktop environment, the

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

office suite, and other popular software applications that use the

Qt toolkit Qt (pronounced "cute") is cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems wi ...

History

The first version of KaOS was released as "KdeOS" in 2013. To prevent confusion between the distribution's name and the desktop environment

, the name was changed to "KaOS" in September 2013.

Features

KaOS is distributed via an

ISO image An optical disc image (or ISO image, from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media) is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system. ...

, and exclusively supports

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A compu ...

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

processors. KaOS is a desktop

rolling release Rolling release, also known as rolling update or continuous delivery, is a concept in software development of frequently delivering updates to applications. This is in contrast to a ''standard'' or '' point release'' development model which uses s ...

, built from scratch with a very specific focus. The focus on one desktop environment (

KDE Plasma 5 KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default ...

), one toolkit ( Qt), one architecture (

x86_64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mo ...

), with an emphasis on evaluating and selecting the most suitable tools and applications.

Applications

The default applications include:

Reception

Phoronix wrote in 2016, "Overall, I was quite pleased with it for being a niche distribution. KaOS was easy to install and was quickly running on a bleeding-edge KDE Plasma 5 stack. Overall, it was a fun and pleasant few hours spent with KaOS." FossMint stated in 2017, that KaOS "is a modern, open-source, beautifully designed, QT and KDE-focused Linux distro. It is a rolling release that ships with KDE Plasma as its default Desktop Environment, uses Pacman as its package manager, and has a 3-group structure repository on GitHub." and "The fact that it is a rolling release means that you will never need to worry about future updates the moment you have a version installed like in the case of

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

and the like where you would need to consider whether to perform a clean installation of another “major version” or not." Hectic Geek reviewed KaOS in 2014, and wrote that the distribution was not very fast, but included all necessary applications. Jesse Smith from DistroWatch Weekly wrote a review of KaOS 2014.04. Smith said the features of KaOS worked well. Robert Rijkhoff reviewed KaOS 2017.09 for DistroWatch Weekly, and he said that "KaOS seems to be trying a little bit hard to be different". ZDNet wrote a hands-on review about KaOS 2014.06: Dedoimedo reviewed KaOS 2014.12: Jack Wallen from Linux.com stated his opinion about KaOS in 2016, and said that the distribution is beautiful.

References

External links

*
KaOS Forum
*
KaOS in OpenSourceFeed gallery
{{Linux distributions Pacman-based Linux distributions Rolling Release Linux distributions x86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions Independent Linux distributions