KaOS Offers A Nice KDE Linux Experience

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KaOS Offers A Nice KDE Linux Experience

One of the lesser known distributions requested for testing as part of our upcoming 10+ Linux distribution performance comparison was KaOS. KaOS is a Linux distribution built from scratch but does make use of Arch's Pacman...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KaOS-KDE-Linux-Experience

[hangingwithsnoopy]

I fully agree, I use it not on my main desktop as the packages are limited for it but the ones that run do run amazing and is my favourite Distro for my Acer C710 Chromebook. It is only a couple of packages away from being complete. The most obvious is Steam being only 32 bit, and yes i know it is possible but defeats the 64bit purpose.

[edoantonioco]

Finally we will see a benchmark than will include kaosx. The only problem is than steam cant run on it since its a 32 bits package (same reason why I dont plan to use it), but its definitely a great distro.

[theriddick]

Would be interested to see how this compares to Ubuntu GNOME (15.10 or 16.04) For open-source driver performance.

[sarfarazahmad]

it not just uses pacman, it is also binary compatible with arch

[tigerroast]

You're damn straight it's a great distro! When you have such a specific goal with even more specific parameters, you end up with a product that's very well-tailored. Runs smoothly on my old HP TouchSmart.

The main issue with KaOS is that it's only as good as the latest KDE releases, so those that feel some type of way about KDE's status will also feel some type of way about this distro. Like those who think KDE's flat designs/icons are ugly. I couldn't begin to fathom how uptight I'd have to be to do the same. Not liking it is one thing, but saying it's UGLY is a stretch by some measure.

[tigerroast]

it not just uses pacman, it is also binary compatible with arch

Not entirely true. It can install and make use of a lot of pacman's file formats, but the file system hierarchy, dependencies and kernel are different. KaOS has /sbin, Arch does not. And plenty of Arch's packages depend on Arch's kernel; some of the utilities and lower-level packages need the latest kernel. Arch provides this (along with the packages that need the latest kernel at the same time they update linux-*), while KaOS is more conservative.

[darkcoder]

it not just uses pacman, it is also binary compatible with arch

Since it uses pacman, it may share or have similar package build recipes. But they compile their stuff completely independent of Arch. That's like say for example... You get one of those Linux magazines with cd or dvd. Installed a .txz universal binary package. Doesn't that make your Debian, Fedora, etc fully binary compatible with Slackware.

Hey and btw, how can they be binary compatible when the gcc version differs????
KaOS gcc 4.9.3 https://github.com/KaOSx/core/blob/master/gcc/PKGBUILD
Arch gcc 5.3.0 https://projects.archlinux.org/svnto...h=packages/gcc

I hope you are not the same guy a couple of months ago swear that KaOS was based on Arch, even when the project creator stated otherwise in a reply.

[mcirsta]

From what I could tell KaOS is highly based on Arch as far as their package recipes go but they do make their own packages and Arch repos would probably not work.

I did try it a couple of times but KDE proved too unstable on it and it kept randomly crashing. It's still OK if you want to see what the latest KDE looks like I suppose.

[Azpegath]

Improvement request: The photo viewer is really showing its age.. Opening a new page just to have a photo there, with "Previous" and "Next" feels very dated and is really cumbersome. I'd like to see high resolution versions of the images in the article but I can't see it in the article and the ones I get to see on the photo page are hardly any better. Doing a more "modern" approach by allowing the user to click a image and an overlay comes up with a high resolution-version of the image would be a lot nicer!