KaOS Linux distribution: Moving away from KDE Plasma

The Linux distribution KaOS 2026.02, released last week, brings a remarkable change: it is dropping support for KDE Plasma. Until now, this was the only available desktop environment. Now KaOS relies on niri as a Wayland compositor and Noctalia as a shell.

This is reported by the KaOS developers in the release announcement. “You will not find Plasma or Kwin on this ISO, although KaOS has always been a pure KDE Plasma distribution. Instead, you will find a niri/Noctalia based system,” they explain there. The programmers state that the desire to move away from systemd played a role. They are therefore working to examine the feasibility of switching to Dinit for the distribution. However, they must replace Plasma for this, as it relies heavily on systemd -- and according to them, this is set to become a mandatory and not just optional requirement in the foreseeable future. However, systemd is still in use at the moment.

KaOS remains Qt-based

The experiments with the Noctalia shell have proven to be a good option. This also means that KaOS can continue to focus on Qt. Therefore, KaOS 2026.02 continues to be GTK-free and comes with Qt/KDE-based apps. Niri is a scrollable, tile-based Wayland compositor. Quickshell is a flexible toolkit for creating desktop shells with QtQuick for Wayland. The Noctalia shell provides a minimalist desktop shell for Wayland.

Limine is used as the bootloader by default. Further options for UEFI installations will remain available via Calamares, but Limine has now replaced systemd-boot as the default. Niri (version 25.11), Noctalia (4.4), and Quickshell (0.2.1) are included for the desktop shells. The developers built them on Qt 6.10.2. To complete the setup, KaOS installs options such as cliphist, ddcutil, pavucontrol-qt, and xwayland-satellite.

Even though the KaOS maintainers want to move away from systemd, they have replaced the now-aging version 254. The ISO creation with the latest version 257 repeatedly failed, so 255.22 is now included; installations will then be upgraded to systemd 257.10.

The base system is also more up-to-date: GCC 15.2.1, Glibc 2.42, and Binutils 2.45.1, Opencv 4.12.0, Poppler 26.02.0, Gstreamer 1.28, Pipewire 1.4.9, ZFS 2.4.0, CMake 4.2, OpenSSH 10.2, Bash 5.3, Protobuf 33.5, and Mesa 25.3.5 are now included on the ISO. Linux 6.18.10 is used as the kernel. Further details are provided in the release announcement. Current ISO images are available for download on the KaOS project's download page.

The move away from KDE Plasma is a significant step. Until now, KaOS was one of the distributions that integrated new Plasma versions early and was therefore often used for testing them. For example, KaOS 2024.01 already included Plasma 6 when it was still officially a preview version.

(dmk)