With kernel 6.8 comes support for bcachefs and KaOS Linux has added it as an option. The only catch is bcachefs is only available when doing a manual partitioning within the Calamarers installer.

For those who don't know, bcachefs is a copy-on-write file system that offers the features of ZFS and Btrfs with the speed and reliability of ext4 or XFS. The bcachefs file system is also supported by the KDE Partition Manager, which is found on KaOS Linux 2024.05.

Speaking of the Plasma Desktop, KaOS Linux 20024.05 ships with version 6.0.5, KDE Gear 24.05, and KDE Frameworks 6.2, which are all built on the Qt 6.7.1 framework. You'll also find a new phonon sound backend.

For the moment, VLC has yet to be ported for Qt6, so phonon-mpv is used by default (because it supports Qt 6). There are other applications that now conform to Qt6, such as Gcompris, Calligra, KWave, and Kaffeine.

Other updates include Python 3.11, Glib2 2.80, Systemd 253.19, ZFS 2.2.4, KMod 32, OpenSSL 3.3, FFMPEG 6.1, OpenJDK 17, and Mesa 24.07.

The ISO no longer includes the kernel modesetting for all graphics cards, to save about 700 Mb of space. As well, GTK2 has finally been removed from the KaOS repositories.

You can read the full report on the release here and download the ISO from the official download page.