KaOS has released the Dinit 2026.06 RC ISO, representing its most major step yet in moving away from systemd as the init system.
The new ISO uses Dinit, Turnstile, and seatd for system startup, completing the init-system transition. However, KaOS notes the distribution is not yet fully systemd-free. Systemd’s udev and tmpfiles remain in use for now, and elogind is included solely to maintain polkit functionality.
But let’s recall what led to this. Earlier this year, KaOS cited upstream systemd changes, notably regarding split /usr layouts, as increasing maintenance challenges. Additionally, KDE Plasma’s growing reliance on systemd components made it less compatible with KaOS’s goals.
As a result of all this, the distro removed Plasma from the default ISO and introduced a Niri and Noctalia-based Wayland desktop. Yes, Plasma 6 remains in the repositories, but the default installation no longer follows the Plasma-first approach that has defined KaOS for over a decade.
KaOS 2026.03 continued the transition by replacing systemd-boot with Limine and switching from mkinitcpio to Dracut. While systemd was still used as init, this release removed systemd from key early-boot components and set the stage for the current Dinit switch.
And that brings us to today, when KaOS Dinit 2026.06 RC marks this next step. The ISO no longer includes Plasma or KWin by default and continues with the Niri and Noctalia desktop stack.
Expectably, the display manager has also changed: SDDM has been replaced by greetd, a minimal, agnostic, and flexible login manager daemon, with tuigreet, which better suits the new seatd-based setup. At the same time, the ISO remains GTK-free and continues to provide Qt and KDE-based applications.
Limine is now the default bootloader, with other UEFI options still available via the Calamares installer. systemd-boot is no longer offered. Calamares has been updated to function correctly on a pure Wayland system, including fixes for QML modules requiring text input during installation.
The desktop stack features Niri 26.04 and Noctalia v5 alpha, built on Qt 6.11. Additional components, including cliphist, brightnessctl, ddcutil, pavucontrol-qt, qt6ct, and xwayland-satellite, complete the environment.
Core system updates include Linux kernel 7.0, Dinit 022, Mesa 26.1.2, PipeWire 1.6.6, OpenSSH 10.3, Bash 5.3, Coreutils 9.11, Libgcrypt 1.12.2, Nano 9.0, Curl 8.20, OpenCV 4.13, Poppler 26.06, GStreamer 1.28, ZFS 2.4.2, CMake 4.3, and Protobuf 35.
Some limitations, however, remain. RAID installations are not supported. XFS is unavailable for BIOS installs because GRUB does not currently install with the latest XFS. VirtualBox users must enable 3D acceleration and use VMSVGA, as the ISO relies on Wayland.
For additional details, see the announcement. The 2026.06 RC ISO image is available for download from the project’s Sourceforge page.
