KaOS 2021.06 Brings in Plasma 5.22, JPEG XL Support, and More

KaOS is an independent Linux/GNU distribution built from scratch. It uses Qt and KDE, comes baked in with pacman as its package manager.

The latest version comes with useful upgrades. Let’s discover what this version has to offer.

What’s New?

KaOS 2021.06 comes with Plasma 5.22, which is the latest and the most stable release currently. Not just limited to stability, it also provides better flexibility and usability. To know more about the desktop environment, you can refer to our article on Plasma 5.22.

To give you a quick overview, the most remarkable new feature Plasma 5.22 presents is Adaptive Transparency. It means the panel and panel widgets will be pleasantly translucent. However, if there are any maximized windows, they will become entirely opaque.

Also, Plasma Wayland session now supports Activities. Thus, you can keep your work separate from other tasks. In other words, you will get the most out of your activity by staying focused on it.

Along with the desktop environment upgrade, some of the key changes include:

• Plasma System Monitor now replaces KSysguard.
• No need to adjust a mirror list to install/update KaOS anymore. KaOS will be using Fosshost as the default mirror, which utilizes Fastly CDN to deliver the content from a nearby location without you needing to select a mirror explicitly.
• KWin Wayland now includes the Present Windows effect.
• New applications added include Maliit virtual keyboard packages.
• Support for JPEG XL, a modern option for the JPEG format.

Other Improvements

• The Calamares installer has two new QML modules to provide consistent layout and the interactive map that you notice in the installer should work fine without an active internet connection.
• All of the latest Plasma Desktop packages are built on Qt 5.15.2+. These include Frameworks 5.83.0, Plasma 5.22.2, and KDE applications 21.04.2.
• LibreOffice has replaced Calligra as the default office suite.
• Installing on RAID is currently unavailable.

For more details you can refer to the official announcement.

Summing Up

KaOS is making progress towards providing a complete and focused open-source operating system. They are working on presenting constant enhancements within the scope of KDE.

Download KaOS 2021.06

What do you think about KaOS with Plasma 5.22? Would you be willing to try it out?