A look at the KaOS Linux distro

in linux on 2014-06-17 14:17 (#3NZ)

Like KDE? Looking for something new and innovative? Have a look at KaOS. As described on its home page, KaOS is "A lean KDE Distribution", and it gives these as the ideas and principles behind the distribution:

Rolling distribution
Built from scratch (not derived from some 'larger' distribution)
KDE desktop / Qt toolkit only
x86_64 architecture only

Interesting to have a distro that's not just a remash of some version of Ubuntu, and the narrow focus of the distro means there are fewer moving parts to worry about. I'll be giving it a look over the weekend. Here is KaOS' page on Distrowatch. But J.A. Watson over at ZDNet does a pretty reasonable job of reviewing it this week, too.

Love The KDE (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-17 17:21 (#24S)

This sounds similar to SolydK/SolydXK perhaps?

I went through looking for decent KDE-based distributions and against my inclinations ended up liking Kubuntu most of all. I didn't want to give any extra eyeballs to Canonical but it's really the most useful one I tried. All the others were either flaky or lacking in sufficient user base to make them sustainable.

Re: Love The KDE (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-17 21:35 (#250)

Interesting, that's the first I'd heard of soldkx. But it's the first I'd heard of kaos, too. I'm an opensuse guy and have been since SUSE 7.1 (2001 or so). I find opensuse usually does nice work with stock KDE, while Kubuntu has some rough edges. But that's my experience/preference, and I admit not everybody is into the somewhat heavy install footprint of opensuse.

Re: Love The KDE (Score: 2, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-17 21:52 (#252)

Wow - thanks for the post. I just checked out soldkx and discovered some software I'd never heard of, packaged as part of their "back office" product:

Internal information streams with SeedDMS.
Employee management with OrangeHRM.
Customer relations, and leads with Zurmo.
Build and manage a professional site with Typo3.
Invoicing with SiWapp.

Wasn't aware of any of these - will be checking them out! That's what I love about sites like this.

Re: Love The KDE (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-17 23:24 (#256)

Glad to help! I stayed away from Suse mostly because of the MS chumminess, but it does seem to have retained its fan base and seems a bit more exciting than Redhat.

I had very high hopes for Mint but they don't lavish much attention on KDE and their upgrade policy is medieval. There are several nice little obscure distros -- PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Sabayon, Chakra -- but after trying most of them I ended up with Kubuntu because it worked better.

Re: Love The KDE (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-18 13:18 (#25K)

Actually, you don't hear much about the chumminess anymore. I think it mostly went away when Novell sold SUSE to Attachmate, ("attach-meat" ha ha), who has done a great job of selling SUSE on its own merits. To listen to the recent press releases, I think their new "lover" is SAP. They're making a lot of noise about SUSE being the best platform to run SAP on. I don't know much about SAP but I get the impression it's not fun.

Sounds familiar (Score: 2, Informative)

by nemasu@pipedot.org on 2014-06-18 01:44 (#25C)

Pretty much the same idea I had a while back: http://nooplinux.org (although I use it for development too).
Interestingly enough, I'm never going to go back to using another distro, not because noop is 'better' (far from it),
but because I know exactly where everything is, and how everything works, it's really nice.
I see that they use pacman? I've been debating changing my package manager to something ... cleaner.
Although, the way it is now is extremely 'Unix-y', all data are in files, and the 'package manager' is a shell script haha.

TL;DR Great to see more KDE distros! Building a distro from source is not quick and easy.

Totally need Don Adams error boxes (Score: 1)

by marqueeblink@pipedot.org on 2014-06-19 12:48 (#268)

Your RPM installation failed... Sorry about that Chief!