In the future, if someone asks which desktop environment you use, and you say "KDE5," you might receive a look of surprise. That's because in the future, the KDE project will develop Plasma 5, KDE Frameworks 5, and KDE Applications 5 independently, and the results will not appear as a single package. In other words, you won't see a combined release date and a standalone component with the name KDE followed by a version number. Of course, that doesn't stop individual Linux projects from putting the pieces together. Various projects and distributions have been releasing next-generation KDE test images for some time now.

The KaOS project [1] has boldly pushed forward in an attempt to keep pace, and it has a reputation for faithfully following the latest KDE developments. KaOS has taken this loyalty a step further than any other distribution and has already migrated more than 150 applications from the KDE applications pool to Qt5, completing the rebuild before most of these applications have announced their own official Qt5 versions. The familiar apps updated for Qt5 include Dolphin, digiKam, Kipi-Plugins, Kdenlive, Marble, Ark, kMix, KDE Telepathy, KGet, Quassel, and Kompare. The underpinnings come courtesy of Plasma 5.7, Frameworks 5.2.1, and other components of the KDE environment.

Inside KaOS

KaOS is designed as a rolling release with basic components that include the 3.18.7 kernel, systemd 218, Xorg server 1.16.4, Mesa 10.4.5, Glibc 2.20, GCC 4.9.2, and Python 3.4.2. Deviating from the default Breeze theme, KaOS relies on the Midna theme in light and dark variants. If needed, you can change back to Breeze in the system settings (Figure 1). KaOS is only available for the 64-bit platform; although it borrows components from Arch, such as the Pacman package manager, it is otherwise a new development.

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