KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
KaOS Linux 2025.05 is now available. This independent distribution (meaning that it's not based on another distribution) features KDE's Plasma desktop and Arch Linux's pacman package manager.
In the official release statement, the team announces that KaOS 2025.05 is officially Qt5 free. Qt5 saw its end of life years ago, but the move to Qt6 has been slow-going. However, the announcement does mention that Qt5 has not yet been removed from the repositories, so it's still possible to install Qt5 applications (after the installation). It should be noted that Qt5 removal is planned for the near future.
The Plasma desktop is version 6.3.5 and includes KDE Gear 25.04.1 and Frameworks 6.14.0, all of which are built on Qt6.9.0.
There are many other updates, including glibc 2.4.1, binutils 2.44 and GCC 14.2.1, SQLite 3.49.1, pacman 7.0.0, kmod 34.2, iwd 3.4, Poppler 25.05.0, GStreamer 1.26.1, PipeWire 1.4.3, Linux kernel 6.14.8, systemd 254.24, ZFS 2.3.2, tzdata 2025b, OpenSSL 3.5.0, PROJ 9.6.0, Protobuf 31.0, and Mesa 25.1.1.
There's also a new nextcloud-client app, an open source sync tool for Nextcloud. As well, you'll find support for the new bcachefs filesystem. Although still in the experimental stage, bcachefs is included in the kernel build, and the necessary bcachefs-tools is available in the repositories.
You can read more about the latest release in the official notes and download an ISO from the KaOS download page.
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