While I am a GNOME fan, I recognize how wonderful KDE is too. If you prefer a traditional desktop user interface, KDE is a smart choice. Not only is it it easy to use for beginners, but it offers a ton of customization options for advanced users too.
There are quite a few KDE-based Linux distros, such as Kubuntu, Linux Mint KDE, and Netrunner, but the lesser known KaOS offers a more pure experience. This distro has a goal of remaining lean, while being fairly bleeding edge regarding KDE packages -- it is a great showcase for the desktop environment. Today, version 2015.10 sees release, and you can download it now.
"This ISO is the first time that the default XFS filesystem is CRC and finobt enabled. CRCs enable enhanced error detection due to hardware issues, whilst the format changes also improves crash recovery algorithms and the ability of various tools to validate and repair metadata corruptions when they are found. The free inode btree does not index used inodes, allowing faster, more consistent inode allocation performance as filesystems age", says The KaOS Team.
The team further explains, "changes to SDDM, kwin and kinit make it now possible to start a Plasma Wayland session right from the login manager. An X11 session is of course still default, but the drop-down menu has now a wayland entry too. The default web-browser Qupzilla is one of the first applications that heavily relied on X11 in its code that now is fully ported to run a Wayland session too".
KaOS lists the following notable package updates.
- Frameworks 5.14.0
- Plasma 5.4.1
- KDE Applications 15.08.1 & not yet released ports of KDE Applications
- Linux 4.1.9
- Systemd 226
- Kmod 21
- Networkmanager 1.0.6
- Calligra 3.0Alpha
- Clementine
- Plasma-nm 5.4.1
- Xorg-server 1.17.2
- Mesa 11.0.2
- Glibc 2.21
- GCC 4.9.4
- non-free Nvidia 352.41
- Python3 3.4.3
If you want to download the ISO, you can get it here. It is not compatible with unetbootin, so if you want to "burn" the ISO to a flash drive, follow the instructions here. As per usual, the KaOS Team does not recommend burning a DVD above 4X speed, but going higher should be OK.
Will you try it? Tell me in the comments.