Linux in The News 2-21-22

Last Updated on February 21, 2022 by KC7NYR

KaOS Linux 2022.02 Is Out with KDE Plasma 5.24, Makes Plasma Wayland Default Session

The developers behind the independent and Arch Linux-inspired KaOS distribution released today the KaOS Linux 2022.02 ISO as the second update in 2022 bringing the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment and more.

KaOS Linux 2022.02 comes a little over a month after KaOS Linux’s first release in 2022 and ships with the recently released KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment, which is accompanied by the latest and greatest KDE Frameworks 5.91 and KDE Gear 21.12.2 software suites, as well as the brand-new Kalendar 1.0 app.

With this release, KaOS Linux switches to Plasma Wayland as the default session for new installations. As you can imagine, this big move makes some changes in the distribution, such as the fact that the default media player, SMPlayer, has been replaced by Haruna as it supports Wayland.

In addition, NVIDIA users won’t be able to use the Plasma Wayland live session with the non-free NVIDIA graphics drivers, and VM users will need to set the desired screen resolution in KDE Plasma’s System Settings to use the distribution in a virtual machine.

Under the hood, the KaOS Linux 2022.02 release is powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 kernel series and ships with an updated toolchain that includes components like GNU C Library 2.33, GCC 11.2, systemd 250.3, Mesa 21.3.6, Perl 5.34.0, PHP 8.1.2, GStreamer 1.20, cURL 7.81.0, Vulkan 1.3.205, Wayland 1.20.0, Qt 5.15.3, sudo 1.9.9, and OpenLDAP 2.6.1.

KaOS Linux’s default graphical installer, Calamares, has been updated as well in this release to show a warning message when the partition module has a conflicting configuration for the swap partition. As such, it will no longer set the “bigtime” option when using the XFS file systems. nor use “suspend.”

For more details about the changes included in this release check out the release announcement page. Meanwhile, if you want to give KaOS Linux a try on your personal computer, you can download the new ISO release below or from the official website.