KAOS 2020.01
Just because he can’t resist his urge to pronounce it as chaos doesn’t make it true, discovers a flustered Mayank Sharma.
Just because he can’t resist his urge to pronounce it as chaos doesn’t make it true, discovers a flustered Mayank Sharma with this semi-rolling release distro.
The real difference that sets KAOS apart from others like it isn’t in the specifications but in the execution. On paper KAOS is a KDE distro that’s available only for 64-bit machines. Pull the blinds up and you’ll see tools, utilities and methodologies cannibalised from various different projects, all neatly stacked into a cohesive installation that behaves and performs admirably well.
KAOS’S developers have structured the project’s infrastructure to meet their objectives. The repository structure enables the developers to ship a rolling release that’s more conservative and stable than its more bleeding-edge peers. Since the project builds its own packages, the developers can also ensure that the toolchain is completely Gtk-free, which delivers a far cleaner and more integrated KDE experience than other distros (that are not KDE neon).
The first thing you notice about KAOS’ custom KDE desktop is the awkwardly placed application launcher that’s on the right side of the desktop. We tried using it where it was but it turned out to be too much of a distraction. On the plus side though, repositioning the application launcher is perhaps the only thing you’d want to change about the distro.
KAOS is a live installable distro that uses the Calamares installer. One of the highlights of the latest release is the improved support for Nvidia’s hybrid graphics hardware. To that end, the Calamares installer has been tweaked to support the non-free Nvidia Prime technology as well. The distro uses the XFS filesystem, and you can’t switch to another, unless you are installing in a Uefi-equipped box, which requires a Fat32-formatted /boot partition.
Also, while the distro believes in adapting existing tools for its needs, it recently dropped the Kaptan greeter app in favour of its own home-brewed version called Croeso, which is Welsh for welcome. The Qml-coded Croeso exposes a lot more settings than other greeters. In fact, we think that the app can be used as an alternative to
KDE Control Center to tweak the frequently used settings, which is how we used it. Surprisingly, the greeter app when running KAOS in the live environment, which includes an offline installation guide, isn’t Croeso.
The usual suspects
KAOS bundles all the usual productivity apps that you’d expect from a desktop distro. Two that stand out in the menus, however, are the client for the Seafile file-hosting server and a link to the web-based instance of the proprietary communications platform, Skype. The app that was conspicuous by its absence was an email client.
Two popular apps that have long been the Achilles’ heel of Kde-only distros like KAOS are Firefox and
Libreoffice. For the browser, KAOS relies on Falkon (previously known as Qupzilla) which is essentially just a Qt-wrapper for Chromium. The office suite of choice used on the distro for a long time has been Calligra Suite.
However, while this is adequate for several tasks, it isn’t a match for Libreoffice in terms of functionality. KAOS has now replaced it with stock Libreoffice, thanks to its improved KDE integration that enables it to ship as a pure Qt app.
To help users flesh out their installer, KAOS uses the
Octopi graphical application installer, which is a front-end to the powerful Pacman package manager. So while it makes use of Arch tools, KAOS is not your typical Archbased distro.
As we mentioned earlier, in order to maintain its tight integration KAOS builds all its packages in its three repositories from scratch specifically for KAOS. Furthermore, it also provides a user community package repository called KAOS Community Packages (KCP). You can browse KCPS on the project’s website and install them essentially with a single click, thanks to a helper program that’s integrated into the distro’s package management system.