KaOS

Reader supplied reviews for KaOS Average rating 5.8 from 30 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on KaOS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 2026.022025.112024.112023.112022.122021.102020.112019.102018.122017.112016.112015.112014.12 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 2026.02 Rating: 7 Date: 2026-02-17 Country: Ireland Votes: 3 It is nearly there but not ready as a daily driver. The noctalia desktop is without a doubt a breath of fresh air, they really made a good job of it. The system is fast and responsive when up and running and runs kde apps. The layout is very customisation and feels very light and beautiful. The install is very easy, you just have to make sure that you select the bootx64 from bios as the boot option, otherwise your device might report that no os is installed. The reason why it is not ready as a daily driver is because of missing functionality and packages. For example, when you go to network from the settings, there is no way to add a vpn, this would have to be done via command line only. I found it strange because there is a widget for a vpn, seems like the config is only half done. This is not an arch distro so the packages are limited to what the dev provides or flatpaks which was an issue for me as apps like brave, synology drive client are missing as native apps. Brave I found strange and is only available as a flatpak. The brave curl command does not work either because it wants yay...etc installed. This I found disjointed in general because the its not supposed to be an arch distro but its clearly looking for aur components. Personally I think that any distro that goes independent should have its own packages for the most popular software and I feel kaos leans too much on flatpak. No native way to add a vpn is a deal breaker and I feel that the distro was released a little too prematurely with the new de. Drivers are an issue too as the dell laptop I used did not have the native built in graphics drive. I did install it which solved a login screen loading issue but the display brightness widget did not work at all. I will try again when its a bit more polished and complete but for now, I will leave it by the wayside. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2026.02 Rating: 6 Date: 2026-02-16 Country: United Kingdom Votes: 0 Interested to try this since it has been refactored to abandon KDE and use Noctalia for its desktop. All attempts to boot from the ISO in a VirtualBox VM were unsuccessful and would result in a black screen and no desktop, regardless of which graphics driver was used. So it was flashed to USB and installed on a spare Intel-based laptop with an SSD and 16Gb RAM. The installer didn't include any English other than US, but apart from that the installation was painless and did a decent job of pinpointing my exact location and setting locale accordingly. First login and the Noctalia bar is vertically arranged on the right of the screen. It was relatively easy to move, and change it to a nice dark theme, although setting that didn't change the theme or decorations of any applications themselves. The bar has some pinned apps by default in the centre, system shortcuts at one end and notifications etc at the other. Its a bit of a jumble but not too hard to rearrange. Using Noctalia feels a bit unfamiliar but smooth nonetheless. The distro itself has a selection of KDE applications like Kate, Konsole and even a couple of KDE games. KaOS uses pacman as its package manager, but this seemed to be a single threaded application of pacman for downloads, so these were slow. I'd like to revisit KaOS when the Noctalia part has been tweaked and polished a little more. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2025.05 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-06-14 Votes: 6 It's the best KDE I tried so far. The opinions from the creator are a match to mine. Package manager is pacman although this distro is not based on arch or its derivatives. You get KDE as an Desktop Environment and packages are built with qt ui libs, with very few exceptions. Additional packages are available as KCP which is the AUR equivalent of the arch world. Own packages are easily created using known pacman based PKGBUILD instructions and are such easily identifiable and removed without traces apart from left-over user configurations. It's only available as x86_64 so other architectures will have to use something else. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 30 reader reviews of KaOS...