It was roughly 12 years ago that KaOS was first released. One of this Linux distribution's main goals was to focus on the KDE Plasma desktop. Over the years, this rolling-release, Arch-based distribution did an outstanding job of presenting the KDE Plasma desktop, and I assumed it would always do so. You know what happens when you assume.

In a recent announcement, the developers made it clear that there were big changes coming to the KaOS. Said change was a migration away from KDE Plasma, in favor of Niri/Noctalia, a lightweight Linux desktop that combines the Niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor with the Noctalia GUI shell.

But why? Why would the developers make this change after such a long relationship with KDE? In a word, the answer is systemd.

The official announcement makes the reason for the change fairly clear:

“Running an install on systemd 257 has been tested [for] a while now, [and] creating an ISO with it still fails." The announcement continues, “Work is ongoing to see if a move to Dinit is viable for this distribution, which also means looking for an alternative to Plasma, since Plasma pretty much demands systemd, and will be fully mandatory soon.”

Hence the shift to Niri/Noctalia.

The problem is that the developers cannot build a working ISO with the most recent release of systemd, unless they move away from KDE Plasma. The reason for that failure is that full support for a split /usr setup (such as what is used by KaOS) is no longer viable.

The good news is that Niri/Noctalia will remain a Qt-focused distribution. If you're a big fan of KDE Plasma, it'll still be installable from the KaOS repositories.