Ever since Bryan did his post where he read the email from Bernhard Rosenkraenzer of OpenMandriva, I switched all my Linux computers to OpenMandriva Lx. Sadly, a couple of months in a real problem began: random Brave browser crashes. That issue generated a lot of traffic on the OpenMandriva forum. Even more sadly, the issue remains and has so for at least four months. Brave is the browser I use and if it's crashing regularly and randomly I am unable to get any work done. It's a real shame, too. OMLx is a fine, fine OS. It's lightning fast to install, great support in the forums, friendly folks there, too. The OM Welcome app is one of the best "Hello, newbie!" apps I have ever seen. I have nothing but praise for OMLx. Just that one, albeit quite jarring, issue with Brave spoils the experience. It was truly disappointing to load a new distro on my Linux devices, but it had to be done.
KDE Plasma desktop is what I prefer, so I got to looking around at distros whose main focus is Plasma. I've always had good luck with Kubuntu, so I put it as my fail-safe distro. Scanning the horizon further I discovered KaOS. Like OpenMandriva, it's an independent distro, not dependent on some upstream like Kubuntu is dependent upon Debian. A quote from the KaOS homepage: "KaOS is an independent, built from-scratch Linux distribution, focused on Qt and KDE." Well, that certainly sounds interesting to me!
Their package repository is smaller, of course. But they do offer a service called KCP, which, if I understand it all correctly, is a repository of user-created packages. For example, Brave is not in the official KaOS repos. But some KaOS users packaged it on their own and put it in KCP. I can run KCP on the command line to install any package in the KCP repo. It was easy to install Brave. And, best of all, no crashes with Brave in the week since installing KaOS. Thank goodness! And, also like OMLx, KaOS has a fantastic "Hello, newbie!" welcome app.
Take a look at KaOS if you're in the market for a Plasma-based distro. https://kaosx.us/
