KaOS 2026.09

Key points

KaOS 2026.09, published on 12 September 2026, is the distribution's second stable ISO built entirely on Dinit instead of systemd. It keeps the Niri/Noctalia desktop, makes Limine the default bootloader and ships a largely rebuilt base. It also sets an end date for Plasma in the KaOS repositories.

Init and login

• Startup, seats and services run on dinit > turnstile > seatd.
• systemd parts are reduced further and remain mainly for udev and tmpfiles. Elogind is kept only for a working polkit, not for login.
• openrc-settingsd returns standalone localed, timedated and timesyncd; console-setup now also provides a standalone localectl replacement.
• The default display manager is the greetd-based Tuigreet, a console greeter. A graphical alternative, noctalia-greeter, is in the repositories but is less complete.

Desktop

• niri 26.04 and Noctalia 5.1.0, with cliphist, brightnessctl, ddcutil, pavucontrol-qt, qt6ct and xwayland-satellite installed.
• The Noctalia v5 rewrite is complete and built directly on Wayland and OpenGL ES. Noctalia 5.1 adds a screenshot region editor with annotations, cellular (ModemManager) support with a mobile data toggle and signal display, and collapsible settings groups. Close to 200 plugins are available.
• The ISO remains GTK-free and ships Qt/KDE applications.
• Plasma 6.7 is still in the repositories, but it is the last Plasma series KaOS will carry: when Plasma moves to 6.8 it will be removed.

Base system

• About 70% of the distribution was rebuilt in the last two months on a new toolchain: GCC 15.3, Glibc 2.43 and Binutils 2.46.1.
• Linux 7.1.13, Mesa 26.2.2, Dinit 022.1, ZFS 2.4.4, Pipewire 1.6.8, GStreamer 1.28, OpenSSH 10.5, Rust 1.98, Cmake 4.4, Ruby 4.0, Nettle 4.0, Mariadb 12.3.3, Poppler 26.09.0 and Elogind 257.16.
• New packages: noctalia-greeter, umbriel, xdg-desktop-portal-umbriel, wlroots and openrc-settingsd. Audacity 4, now Qt 6 based, returns and replaces Tenacity.
• Microcode is built into the kernel for automatic early updates.

Installer and boot

• Limine is the default bootloader. Other UEFI options remain in Calamares; systemd-boot is no longer offered.
• Calamares now runs on a pure Wayland system.
• Automated partitioning offers XFS, EXT4, BTRFS and ZFS. The default is XFS with CRC and finobt enabled.
• Croeso, the first-run assistant, adjusts about 15 common settings and offers packages from six groups.

VirtualBox

• VirtualBox does not fully support Wayland. KaOS boots only with 3D acceleration and the VMSVGA adapter (VBoxVGA cannot be used):

VBoxManage modifyvm <vm_name> --accelerate3d on

Known issues

• Installing on RAID is not possible.
• On BIOS installs XFS is not an option, because GRUB fails to install with the latest XFS.
• Polkit is not fully ported to Turnstile/seatd, so some privilege escalation options do not work.
• The ISO does not support Unetbootin, Ventoy or Rufus; DVDs need a burn speed of 4x or lower.
• ISO files can be verified with a GPG signature; instructions are on the Download page.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.