KaOS 2017.06 has Released, Bring Plasma Desktop 5.10.0 and Qt toolkit 5.9.0
KaOS 2017.06 has been released. This desktop distribution is one of the first that ship with the recently-released Plasma Desktop 5.10.0 and Qt toolkit 5.9.0
KaOS is a desktop Linux distribution that features the latest version of the KDE desktop environment, the Calligra office suite, and other popular software applications that use the Qt toolkit. It was inspired by Arch Linux, but the developers build their own packages which are available from in-house repositories. KaOS employs a rolling-release development model and is built exclusively for 64-bit computer systems.
Just days after Qt 5.9.0 and Plasma 5.10.0 were announced, can you already see both on this new release. Highlights of Plasma 5.10.0 include Task Manager gaining options for middle mouse click such as grouping and ungrouping applications, media controls and virtual keyboard on lock screen, revamped password dialogs for network authentication, performance optimizations in Pager and Task Manager, the security of the lock screen architecture was reworked and simplified and file copying notifications have a context menu on previews
Babe Music Player
Plasma developers are working on two new Music Players, now included in the KaOS repositories are both. Babe has become the default player on this ISO, Elisa is available as another option.
Other recent additions include a GUI for git QGit and QDirStat, a graphical application to show where your disk space has gone.
For those who do not want to build packages they miss from the repositories the option to use Flatpak has been added to KaOS. Discover is added as the GUI for Flatpak.
A new option is the addition to verify the authenticity of downloaded KaOS ISO files through GPG signature verification, see the Download page for further details and instructions.
Discover to handle Flatpaks
As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.34.0, Plasma 5.10.0, KDE Applications 17.04.1 & not yet released ports of KDE Applications. All built on Qt 5.9.0.
Mesa includes experimental Nouveau patches so QtWebengine based applications and web browsers can again be used on systems running the Nouveau driver. This fixes a long standing bug going back to the middle of 2015.
Base of the system
Most notable major updates to the base of the system are Qt 5.9.0, Boost 1.63.0, Glib2 2.52.2, Kmod 24, Mesa 17.1.1, x265 2.4, FFMpeg 3.3, DBus 1.10.18, Ruby 2.4.1, Protobuf 3.3.1, PyQt 5.8.2 and a move to qtwebkit-tp replacing no longer maintained qt5-webkitKaOS repositories no longer provide Qt 4. It is a good three years ago that development for Qt 4 stopped, late 2015 all support including security fixes ended. Any application that has not made the transition to Qt 5 in all this time can no longer be supported in KaOS. Either they actually are no longer maintained or their development is ignoring the implications of building on a possible insecure toolkit.
The Linux kernel has all the needed ucode built-in for a fully automated Early Microcode update.
Read the rest of the release announcement for further information and screenshots.
