Two months after the 2025.03 release, KaOS, a rolling KDE-centric Linux distro betting on the XFS file system, released its latest stable, 2025.05 ISO.
Expectably, the distro ships with the latest and greatest from the KDE ecosystem: Plasma 6.3.5, KDE Gear 25.04.1 apps collection, and Frameworks 6.14, all built upon Qt 6.9.
KDE Gear, in particular, has introduced valuable enhancements: Dolphin file manager now offers initial support for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and the remote desktop application KRDC enhances usability with improved FreeRDP support and desktop scaling.
Moreover, Okular has stepped up its document security capabilities by supporting PGP/GPG-based digital signatures, and the Falkon browser has added WebSocket blocking functionality.
Several KDE applications, such as the Frescobaldi LilyPond sheet music editor, the Krita sketching and painting editor, the Kamoso camera app, and the Calligra Plan project management application, have been fully transitioned to Qt6.
The system base has also received upgrades, including the Linux kernel 6.14, Glibc 2.4.1, GCC 14.2.1, and Mesa 25.1.1. System administrators and enthusiasts will appreciate the addition of Nextcloud-client for file synchronization and the experimental inclusion of the promising copy-on-write Bcachefs filesystem, which is available for manual testing via the Calamares installer.
Furthermore, the sound backend shifts from VLC to phonon-mpv, fully aligning with Qt6 readiness. Display manager SDDM has also stepped forward, now providing an option to operate in Wayland mode using kwin_wayland, inching KaOS closer to complete independence from X11.
From a security and reliability standpoint, the default filesystem remains CRC and finobt-enabled XFS. For those verifying downloads, KaOS continues to support GPG signature authentication.
The release announcement provides detailed information about all changes. The ISO image can be downloaded from the project’s Download page. Since KaOS is a rolling-release Linux distro, current users need only execute sudo pacman -Syu to upgrade to the latest version.
