While celebrating the beginning of 2017, KaOS team has proudly presented KaOS 2017.01 latest monthly snapshot of independently developed, rolling GNU/Linux distribution offering a smooth and cutting edge KDE experience.

KaOS team is delivering first snapshot in 2017 with fresh and cool look. It comes with updated version of Midna artwork, which mainly includes inclusion of sddm theme that employs a layered QML model. This will ease the task of selecting between default Plasma session and wayland session. Also, the system panel is moved to right side with vertical orientation.

KaOS 2017.01 Preview CREDIT : KaOS Blog

As any other monthly snapshot of KaOS, current snapshot is also shipping latest available packages for Plasma Desktop which includes KDE Frameworks 5.29.0, Plasma 5.8.5, KDE Apps 5.20.0 and some pre-release port of KDE Apps. All these packages are build against Qt 5.7.1.

Most notable major updates to the base of the system are Boost 1.62.0, ICU 58.2, Ruby 2.4.0, Systemd 232, FFMPEG 3.2, Linux 4.8.15, Mesa 13.0.2, Hunspell 1.6.0, Gpgme 1.8.0, Gstreamer 1.10.2 and a move to Openjpeg 2 (2.1.2)

New is the use of a GUI warning on system updates that require user action. Adding such notices to a News item or having an install message included in (at time large) pacman output is too easily missed. A rolling distribution will have to make such changes over the lifetime of an install. Thus the need for a better way to communicate is now implemented, see an example for the upcoming OpenVPN update for all users.

For more information on KaOS 2017.01 snapshot, see release announcement in projects blog.