 Today I'm going to be taking a look at the recent release of KOS. KOS is an independent Linux distribution. Independent means it's not based on a parent distribution. It's not forked from something else. It's its own thing. And KOS, it's always been a rather interesting Linux distribution. They focus on the KDE Plasma desktop. And of course KOS maintains its own repository of software being an independent distribution. About a week ago they had a big release. They released KOS version 2022.06. So I'm gonna download that ISO and I'm gonna take it for a spin inside a virtual machine. So I downloaded the ISO for KOS. I will say that when you go to their website and go to the downloads page, they don't offer a torrent download. They only have an HTTP download and that thing takes a long time. I'm talking it could take hours. So that is one thing I wish the KOS team actually did is had an official torrent that was available. Because right now the download speeds for this thing are very slow. Now one thing I will also mention is KOS. The name, the spelling, K-A-O-S, you would actually think that's pronounced chaos. And that's actually the way I have pronounced it on videos in the past when I've taken a look at KOS. But it's actually supposed to be KOS, not chaos. Which I think is unfortunate because I actually think chaos, calling your operating system chaos, that's kind of cool. That would have been great. I'm gonna go ahead and choose the first option here at the boot menu. I'm just gonna go ahead and get into the live environment. And we boot into our live environment. Now the way they have KDE Plasma set up I find rather interesting and a little bit strange because they have a side panel which you often see these days because so many people now have these ultra-wide monitors where you've got a lot more horizontal space rather than vertical space. So it kind of makes sense to throw your panel on the side. But typically you throw it on the left hand side because in most situations everything is done left to right on a computer. It's really weird to have a panel on the right because how often are you going to the right side of a screen? Think about all of your controls for like your web browser and things like that. It's kind of weird to just throw all of this on the right hand side of the screen. It would have made a lot more sense from an ergonomic standpoint actually put it on the left hand side of the screen. I'm sure you can change that. But let me go ahead and run through an installation. They are gonna use the Calamari's installer. They're shipping with the latest Calamari's 3.3. So I'm gonna click install KOS. First we get a welcome message and we can choose the language for the installer here. American English is the default and that's fine for me. I'm just gonna click next and then the time zone. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US and it's kind of strange. Their Calamari's installer actually has a map and it's using some kind of geolocation to determine exactly where I am. That is actually kind of cool. I've never seen that before in anyone else's Calamari's installer. I'm wondering if that is an option that any distribution could use and maybe most of them just don't choose this option with Calamari's. But that is interesting. But it's chosen America slash Chicago which is the central time zone for me. So that is correct. I'm gonna click next and then the keyboard layout English US is the default and that's fine for me. But of course you can change it if you need to. And you can also test out the keyboard layout by typing a message here. You know whatever it is you want to type. You can type in this little test box here. I'm gonna click next. Then you get to the little packages screen here. And do you want Libre Office installed or not for purposes of this VM? I'll actually not install Libre Office because I don't plan on using it. I can't. I can't actually tick that off. Maybe I have to tick this one. No Office Suite. If I tick that one, that one automatically sets. So I see they control each other. If you flip one on, you flip the other off. They also have a minimal install option. But I'm gonna go ahead and let them install their full suite of applications minus Libre Office because I want to see the default packages that are installed on your standard KOS installation. So I'm going to click next. Now we need to partition our drive. You have two standard options here in Calamari. So you have a race disk, which means this will give the entire virtual hard drive of my virtual machine to KOS. So typically if you're installing an operating system as the only operating system on that disk, this is the option you want to choose. Manual partitioning is the option if you have some weird custom configuration partition scheme that you need to set up, or if you're dual booting, then it makes sense to do a manual partition. But I'm going to choose the first option, a race disk. You have the option of no swap, swap, no hibernate, swap with hibernate or swap to file. For purposes of this virtual machine, I'm going to do swap to file because it'll save on space. And then we have our file system. They are defaulting to XFS for the file system, which is fine. It's very old and stable. A lot of servers use XFS. You also have extend for which is another Linux standard file system. It's very stable. And yeah, I'm just going to choose their default with XFS for purposes of this video. Let's go ahead and click next. Now the boot loader, what do we want? Do we want to use grub? Absolutely. Or do we want no boot loader? You absolutely want a boot loader. Don't choose no boot loader unless you absolutely know what you're doing. You only want to choose no boot loader if you already have a boot loader installed, especially if you're already a dual booting with another operating system, then choosing no boot loader might work for you. But otherwise, not installing a boot loader means that your system won't be bootable. So I'm going to click next. And now we need to set up our user my name. What is your name? I'm just going to call my name DT. And then my login name, of course, will be DT. And then we need to set the hostname for this computer. I'm going to call this computer KOS-vert. Then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat the password. Then I get a warning message that my strong and complicated password is too short. Can I just ignore that? Yes, I can just click that. And then reuse user password as root password. Sure, why not? That way, I don't have to remember two different passwords for the DT user and the root account. You do have the option to tick on login automatically without asking for a password. I don't recommend that for privacy reasons. I would always recommend having to type a password to get into your computer. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble. Then I'm going to click Next. And then we get a summary of everything that we have run through so far. Everything looks good. I'm going to click the install button. We get a warning saying the KOS installer is about to make changes to your disk. In order to install 2022.06, you will not be able to undo these changes. So it's about to format the hard drive and start writing to it. And that's exactly what I want it to do. So I'm going to click install now and away it goes. This portion of the installation on my hardware typically takes about five to 10 minutes for most Linux installations. I'm going to pause the video and I'll be back once the installation has completed. The installation has completed. That took seven or eight minutes probably for the installer. And now we have the option of close the installer so we can still play around in the live environment or click the button to restart the system. And that's what I'm going to do. So let's go ahead and restart our freshly installed KOS. And we get to our login manager here. And I really like the look of this login manager here. Let me move my head so we can change users, shut down, restart, sleep. And of course, I just need to enter my password to log us into our KDE Plasma desktop. And we're logged in and we're greeted with a very attractive welcome program. I noticed the name of the program here in the title bar is Crow Esso. I'm not sure what that means. I'm assuming that is a word that means hello or welcome. That's typically what people name these kinds of programs. I believe the country of origin for KOS, the distribution, is the United States. So I'm not really sure what language this word Crow Esso is. But if you're ever in need of actually looking for the welcome program, you're going to need, of course, to know the name Crow Esso because if I just type welcome, yeah, something else comes up splash screen. Hello, hello, doesn't return anything. So that is an unfortunate choice in a name. I think you can't actually search for welcome and actually get the program in the menu system. But luckily, it auto launches the very first time you log in. But this is a very slick welcome program. You can adjust various theming options. For example, widget styles. I'm assuming that's for the KDE plasmoids. You can change mouse behavior. You can change the theming, the icon set, your font settings, yada, yada, yada. And then you have tabs at the bottom. So this was the customized tab here, the main screen. But if we go to packages, yeah, we can play around with installing some different software. If I go to web browsers, we can install Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Otter browser. We've got some different options. If I go back and I choose email clients, we can install KMIL, Thunderbird, Trojita and Cube. I've never actually heard of Cube. I might have to try that out. That's a new email client to me. We have a wallpaper tab here where I guess we can download various wallpapers, I'm assuming these are coming from Unsplash. So that is rather nice than you have the docs tab here where you get some more buttons so you get documentation about various things such as Pacman. Yes, they're going to use Pacman for their package manager. Even though it's an independent distribution, it's not a arch distribution. They are using Pacman, which isn't that unusual because you will see some non-arch distributions use Pacman, for example, because it's not like it's designed strictly for arch. If you build a distribution, an independent distribution like KOS, for example, you can choose any package manager to build your distribution around. You could have chosen an app or RPM or a zipper or something like that, DNF. You could do a lot of different things. For example, I know at least one Red Hat based distribution or at least RPM based distribution, PC Linux OS. It actually uses Debian's apt package manager for their package manager rather than Yum or DNF. So not that strange. You also have documentation about switching to the various NVIDIA drivers. Now in this virtual machine, I'm using free drivers for the virtual machine, but NVIDIA users, especially on KDE Plasma. NVIDIA and KDE Plasma, sometimes they have issues. So that's good that they have some information about that. Additional kernels, if you want to install a different kernel. We have the advanced tab here, which gives us more options for firewalls, adding users, network management. This is this is one of the best welcome applications I think I have ever seen. If not the best. Like the way it's laid out and it's packed with so much useful information about KOS tells you a little bit about the distribution, then the news. Of course, we get the latest release announcement for the latest release. Then you have the quit button. If I go back to customize and go back to the very first screen, you will notice that this is set to auto start every time you log in. If you don't want it to auto start all the time, of course, you would want to tick that off and close it. And then you'll never see it again unless, of course, you go into the menu system and type for what was it? Crow ESO. Then you could get it back up. So I'm going to go through the menu system and see what is installed as far as the default suite of applications. So let's break it down by category. So let's go into games. They only have one game K patients. And in graphics, we really don't have anything here as well. When view, which is KDEs image viewer, and you also have ocular, which is KDEs PDF viewer, their document viewer. Under the internet category, we have Falcon or the web browser. That would explain why they had the web browser thing in the welcome screen as far as do you want Firefox, do you want Chrome? I didn't realize they were shipping such a horrible one browser by default. This is actually KDEs web browser. It's part of the default suite of KDE applications, but I doubt most people would want to run this as a web browser. So you're probably going to want to go through that welcome screen and actually install something like Firefox to get something that's a little better than Falcon. Also, under the internet category, you have KGIT, which is a download manager, part of the KDEs suite of applications. Quasol, which is an IRC client, really nice IRC client. It doesn't look like it was going to auto connect to like a KOS support channel or anything. I always think that's a nice touch when distributions actually have their IRC clients automatically join their own channel. That way, people that are having trouble maybe installing that particular Linux distribution can actually get help immediately. Also, under internet, we had C-File, which is a desktop sync client. I've never actually played with C-File before. We have a multimedia category. We have Alisa, which is a music player, part of, again, KDE app. So everything here is going to be either a default KDE applications or at the very least, it probably should be a Qt-based application. Also, under multimedia, we have K3B, which is a disc burner. It's actually my favorite disc burning utility. I know not everybody burns disc anymore. I still do. And K3B is by far the best free and open source disc burner out there. I always install it. Every time I install Linux, that's one of the first programs I install K3B. I know that makes me sound like a boomer. I'm still burning CDs and DVDs and Blu-rays. But, hey, you know, I still find a need for those. We have Haruna, which is a video player. I've never heard of Haruna. So this is a new one to me. If I go to about Haruna, a configurable video player. This is version 0.8.0. It looks like it is part of the KDE apps because it's using KDE frameworks 5.95. Also, under multimedia, we have Komoso, which is our webcam program, MPV, which is just a video player. It's probably a dependency for Haruna. We also have simple screen recorder, which you can use to record your desktop under the office category. We don't have anything because I didn't install LibreOffice. But if I had to tick that on, obviously the LibreOffice suite would be here in the office category. Then we have our settings, which is the plasma system settings, which let's go ahead and get into that because I want to see a little bit what we can do with theming. For one thing, I'm not crazy about the default theme. It's a little too bright for me. So let's see if we can turn on the dark mode. So if I click on apply, let me move my head there, the apply button was down here. I noticed when I hit apply, though, it's still white here at the bottom part of that window. So I think that's a little bit of a glitch, but it did change the theme. If I go into appearance, we can also change a breeze to breeze dark to breeze twilight. I'm not sure what their default was. It looks like see, I can't even read what the buttons are saying. If I chose breeze twilight, it's a little glitchy, changing the themes at least inside this VM. I'm not sure exactly what those buttons were saying. It was asking me something, but without being able to read it, I have no idea. I wonder if I logged out and logged back in with the theming. Be correct. Let me actually try that. So let me go ahead and log out. Log back in. All right, and let me get into the menu system and do system settings. Yeah, it's still a little strange, the appearance here. And if I try to choose this, yeah, there's something very off with the theming, especially the dark theme, but even the default light theme that was turned on by default. If I click on it and then click apply, I think it's going to still have the same problems if I go to appearance and go to breeze twilight. Yeah, I can actually read it now. So yeah, I guess I'm going to have to stick with the light theme just for the sake of the dark theme is kind of broken where I'm going to have dialogue windows that I won't be able to read. So I better just stick with the default theme. I noticed our wallpaper went away. We had a little crash for the wallpaper. I wonder where I can actually change the wallpaper. Let me do a search here because I'm not that familiar with Katie plasma. Oh, well, when I tried to close the window, the wallpaper came back. I get this. The settings for the current module have changed. You want to apply the changes or discard them? Yeah, apply. And then it went back to the dark theme, didn't it? That's a little glitchy, right? It's a little glitchy. Apply and then try to close. OK, that time it took. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's again, it's a little bit of a bug or it could just be user error. I don't use Katie plasma that often and it's not like I ever live in Katie plasma. Typically the only time you guys see me use Katie plasma. That's all I ever use Katie plasma. I never run it on my own time, right? I always run tiling window managers, typically. But if I go to right click on the desktop, configure desktop and wallpaper, let's see what kind of wallpapers we have available. I'm assuming it's just going to be like the default KDE wallpaper pack. Yeah, a lot of the same stuff I've seen before. But you know, Katie does have really nice wallpapers. I love the abstract art stuff. Here's one that's really nice. That is a beautiful photograph. Let's try safe landing. That's the name of this picture here. That is bright, kind of busy for me. Here's an oldie but a goodie. The shell wallpaper and utopic city. Yeah, that's not bad. I'm going to go to one of my familiar favorites that I often use on plasma. This one here, that's rather nice. Now let's check out this really interesting panel here. So obviously you have the menu here and this is the kickstart menu. If I right click, you could configure application launcher. You've got some things you could play around with if you wanted to and then you had the session buttons right up under the menu. Again, that's not typically where you'd want that because you could accidentally hit those and it's not really, I don't know. It's probably not where I would have put that. Then you have your sticky note application. You have your calculator. People, some people obviously use a calculator all the time, but most people have no need for a calculator to be there. Then you have your workspace switcher. Again, kind of an odd place amongst all of these launchers here, these program launchers. Then you have Dolphin, which of course is KDE's file manager. And it looks like, yeah, I like how the hidden files and directories are kind of grayed out, right? You can kind of barely see them. I probably would. Yeah, if you take off show hidden files, you know, they just go away. But even when you show them, they're kind of blurred out. I'm sure there's an option to actually change that because that's kind of annoying to be honest. And then you have Kate, which of course is plain text editor, part of the KDE suite of applications. And then of course, our web browser, the Falcon web browser. Let's open a terminal. Would Control-Alt-T open a terminal? No. So let me hit Super and type console. So KDE's console, of course, which, oh, I don't know why by default it opened with that geometry there because that was a really, really tiny window. Also, it's kind of a tiny font. But let me make that full screen the font I can correct because I can zoom in. I like the prompt here. I wonder if they're using a bash or ZSH or maybe even fish. I could check if I type ZSH. ZSH is not found. So I'm assuming, of course, we're in bash, so I just entered a bash subchill. Let me exit back out of that one. So it is bash, but that is a neat little bash prompt they're using. So let's do a sudo pacman dash S-Y-U. Let's see what programs are available for an update. This has been out for about a week and it looks like there's about 10 things that need to update, including our login manager, SDDM, and also Pulse Audio is getting an update. Let's go ahead and take that because none of these programs are very big. It should just take a few seconds. Now let me do a sudo pacman dash S and I'm going to try to install something, something that I would expect to be on most Linux distributions. Now KOS focuses mainly on KDE Plasma. They don't have any other desktop environments or window manager additions like officially. So I wonder what Xmonad actually be in their repositories. Target not found. OK, so this is one of the things with KOS being an independent distribution. Their repositories of software very small. The only package a little over a thousand packages in the KOS repos where obviously something like Debian and Arch have tens of thousands of packages in their repositories. So you're going to find some stuff, you know, programs that you want to run that are not going to be packaged for KOS. Now that's for me because I use a lot of weird stuff for your normal kind of computer user. They're probably just going to install KOS. The default suite of applications will be fine. They'll never really need to go search for anything weird and certainly normal programs like your everyday things like Firefox and Chrome and all that, of course, is available. And also these days because Linux, we have these universal packaging formats like Snap, Flatpak, App Image, most mainstream programs are going to be packaged in one or even all of those available formats, which all of those should work on KOS. KOS does use system D as an it's a knit system. So no problems running Snaps, Flatpaks, App Images. I wonder if Htop is installed out of the box. Htop is not here. Surely Htop has got to be in their repository. It is. All right. I was about to throw my hands up in the air and frustration if Htop wouldn't have been in the repos. That's a standard like a Linux staple right there. Let's see how system resource usage is. Now, I've opened a bunch of programs here. So the RAM number could be a little high because there could still be some background processes running from some of the stuff I've opened. But it's using almost no CPU because we're not really doing anything about 2% CPU. And it's using 900 megs of the six gigs of Ram that I gave this virtual machine. Let's do a username dash R. Let's get the kernel there on kernel 5.17.15. Let's get a count of the programs installed out of the box. So if I did Pacman dash, I believe it's capital Q lowercase q right to get a list of all the programs that are installed. And if I piped that into the word count program, so pipe that into WC and give WC this flag dash L for line count, meaning this output where everything is on its own line. I want a line count of it. 917 packages installed out of the box. That is pretty minimal actually. And I didn't choose the minimal install. So the minimal install probably would be really minimal because that's not a lot of programs for a full desktop environment and suite of applications. One thing we should also take a look at is do you have to install software at the command line? Or is there a graphical software center? So if I type for software, they are using Octopi. Octopi is actually really nice. Octopi kind of reminds me of the old Debian Synaptic Package Manager. So Debian has a graphical package manager called Synaptic that breaks things down by category and has a search field where you can search the entire Debian repositories. And Octopi kind of looks a little like the old Synaptic Package Manager. Not exactly on Synaptic. I don't believe is a Qt app. I believe is a GTK app anyway. But they do have that same kind of look and feel. Zero AD is in the repositories for KOS. I think that's a very important application to actually have in your distributions repositories. A fantastic game for you and open source. So that's nice that they have some kind of GUI package manager was Discover here. I typed for Discover. No, what's the other KDE store? But anyway, software, when you just type the word software, the only thing that comes up is Octopi. So I'm assuming that's the your only options is either use Octopi or just use Pacman at the command line. Now, one thing that kind of bugs me and I want to change, I want this panel to move. So if I right click on it and go into edit mode. And now can I drag to move? Yes, we can just drag it over here, get the close button. And I think that makes a lot more sense. Click the close button over here. I think that makes a lot more sense for that panel to be right there than where it was. So I think I'm going to leave that as is. I'm going to keep this VM around. I do think KOS is interesting. I think it's nice to have these independent distributions that are doing their own thing. They're focused on KDE Plasma. That's a very unique KDE Plasma desktop, especially the way they had that right hand panel. So job well done. KOS has actually been around for a while. This is probably the third or fourth time I've taken a look at it on this channel in the five years or so. I've been doing this channel, but I know it existed before I started doing the YouTube channel five years ago. So it doesn't get a lot of attention. And I think part of the reason it doesn't get a lot of attention. I think that small repository of software they have, I think it hurts them a little bit. I think that's often the problem with these independent distributions. I know I've complained about Solus. Solus is a fantastic distribution. It's up for the fact that there are certain programs I want to run that are not packaged in the Solus repositories. And that's going to be the case with KOS as I could never personally run KOS. There's too much stuff I rely on that I couldn't actually get installed through the traditional means using KOS. But if you're a much more generic kind of normal computer user where you just install KDE Plasma, you're fine with the default suite of applications and you're good. I think it's a fascinating distribution and one I am going to keep up with in the future. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Michael Mitchell, Paul West. Why you bald on me? Alan Armoredragons, Chuck Commander, Rengarita Yohkai, Dylan Marstrum, Erion Alexander, a piece of Archimdor, Polytech, Riala Teetz, for less, Red Private Steven, Tools Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at KOS would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. Without each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, I couldn't do what I'd do. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys, the community. If you like my work, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. I still think they should have pronounced it KOS. That's a missed opportunity.