KaOS has released KaOS Dinit 2026.06, the distribution’s first stable ISO fully based on Dinit, completing the init-system transition that reached release candidate status earlier this month.
According to the devs, the new ISO is the result of nearly three years of preparation and a year of trials, rebuilds, and testing, and with this release, KaOS has fully transitioned from systemd to Dinit in its stable distribution.
With the stable ISO, KaOS confirms its startup stack now uses Dinit, Turnstile, and seatd for system startup, seat management, and services. However, KaOS is not yet fully systemd-free. A minimal systemd remains for udev and tmpfiles, and elogind is included solely to maintain polkit functionality.
The stable release extends the transition to all existing KaOS users. All users will migrate to Dinit via the stable repositories. Running pacman -Syu will prompt users to replace systemd, and the necessary Dinit services will be enabled automatically after the update.
The ISO retains the desktop changes introduced during the transition. Plasma and KWin are no longer included. Instead, KaOS provides a Wayland desktop based on Niri and Noctalia Wayland shells, maintaining its focus on Qt. The ISO remains GTK-free and continues to offer Qt and KDE-based applications.
Plasma 6.7 is still available in the KaOS repositories, but it will be the last Plasma series offered. Once KDE releases Plasma 6.8, Plasma will be removed from the KaOS repositories.
The display manager has changed as well. SDDM has been replaced by greetd with tuigreet to better align with the seatd-based stack. Calamares, the graphical installer, has been updated for compatibility with Wayland, including fixes for text input in its QML modules.
Moreover, Limine is now the default bootloader. Other UEFI options are still available in Calamares, but systemd-boot is no longer offered.
The desktop stack includes Niri 26.04 and Noctalia v5 alpha, built on Qt 6.11. Additional components are cliphist, brightnessctl, ddcutil, pavucontrol-qt, qt6ct, and xwayland-satellite.
Base system updates include Linux kernel 7.0, Dinit 022.0, Mesa 26.1.3, PipeWire 1.6.7, ZFS 2.4.3, OpenSSH 10.3, Bash 5.3, Coreutils 9.11, Libgcrypt 1.12.2, Nano 9.0, Curl 8.20, OpenCV 4.13.0, Poppler 26.06.0, GStreamer 1.28, CMake 4.3, and Elogind 257.16.
Newly included packages are dinit, turnstile, greetd, tuigreet, and corrosion. Starship is now the default shell prompt, replacing Powerline.
However, several limitations remain. RAID installation is not supported. XFS is unavailable for BIOS installs because GRUB does not install with the latest XFS. VirtualBox users must enable 3D acceleration and use VMSVGA, as the ISO relies on Wayland. Additionally, Polkit is not fully ported to Turnstile and seatd, so some privilege escalation options may not function.
KaOS Dinit 2026.06 is now available from the project’s download mirrors. Full details are provided in the official announcement.
Image credits: KaOS
