KaOS 2017.09
Resident chaos monkey Jonni Bidwell demands an unsullied, purely Qt5 desktop, and KaOS provides in spades.
Resident chaos monkey Jonni Bidwell demands an unsullied, purely Qt5 desktop, and KaOS provides this in spades with its rolling release model.
Depending on your tastes, the first thing you’ll notice about KaOS will be either: a) the fact that not only is there a vertical application launcher, but it’s on the right hand side ( philistines!–Ed); or b) the friendly Kaptan first-time configuration wizard. Kaptan, forked from the Turkish distro Pisi Linux, helps you set up desktop cosmetics, which launcher menu to use (Make Classic Menus Great Again!) and points you to the project documentation. This will be handy for users new to KDE, who may draw comparisons between looking for a particular setting and being in some nightmarish Borgesian labyrinth. The right hand launcher is easily returned to where gravity intended.
KaOS features the stylish Midna theme, parts of which are enabled by default (the rest uses Plasma’s default Breeze theme). This setup, or going allout Midna, both look good. Fans of dark themes (you miserable lot) will be pleased to discover that the Midna Dark variant doesn’t, like so many others, result in unreadable text in tooltips, context menus or other places that people forgot to shade in. The sticky notes and calculator Plasma widgets are enabled by default, which will be handy for casual scribblers and summations.
By our count this is the fourth time we’ve reviewed KaOS (see LXF188, 197, 212), but the team don’t rest on their laurels so there’s lots of new stuff to talk about. Naturally, this release features a slew of new KDE componentry— Frameworks 5.38, Plasma 5.10 and Applications 17.08. All this atop Qt 5.9.1. By the time you read this some of these numbers will be incremented, such is the nature of rolling releases. Qt4 has been banished from the repositories, which makes it ideal for those with OCD tendencies about toolkit bloat. It’s Qt5 all the way, kids!
Fancy filesystems
KaOS, like RHEL 7.0, now uses the XFS filesystem by default. More conservative types may prefer Ext4, and more adventurous types Btrfs. Interestingly, if you opt for a UEFI install then KaOS will eschew GRUB and install systemdboot. If the kernel isn’t new enough for you, then linux-next is just a few keystrokes/clicks away, so you can encounter bugs that will hopefully be fixed by the time this branch becomes Kernel 4.14.
The proprietary Nvidia driver is available in the main repo and isn’t too far behind (384.67 vs 384.90) what’s available from Nvidia’s website. The Nouveau driver has had an experimental patch applied to fix a longstanding crash with QtWebEngine. So users should be able to use the default Qupzilla browser (soon to be Falkon) without impedance. Plasma on Wayland doesn’t really get much attention, but a lot of progress has been made here and an experimental session is available from the login manager.
Many people see KDE neon as the official showcase for all the latest Plasma bits, and that may be true. But neon is (in its own words) ‘not quite’ a distro and uses Ubuntu 16.04 repos for everything not Plasma-related, so anything installed outside of that sphere will be relatively old and may even behave erratically. KaOS, by way of its independence, has its own repos and the team thoroughly test every single package before mainlining them. It’s a proper distro, innit? It comes with a good selection of Qt applications installed, including Krita, k3b, Gwenview and the Babe music player. Though many people will prefer LibreOffice and Inkscape to Calligra and Karbon.