I have gone for a test ride with the ISO and here is my review.
I really like - as already stated - the theme. Its the most beautiful theme for an operating system that I had seen yet, and I usually dont like light themes. Everything is perfect about it, except the background that seems out of place and ugly.
I like the new QML modules for Calamares (most of them are new to me) and they look really neat as well. Great job! I do see room for improvement here as well, but its really more about small cosmetic changes, and not the functionality or stability of the modules itself.
The UI of the installer itself goes into a good direction as well, while I still think the right hand side buttons to go next and back, look out of place, take space and generally dont feel well placed.
I suggest, to make the tab bar on the bottom clickable, so that we can navigate between them easily.
The German (no-dead-keys) layout has a weird bug: The position of the backtick keys are revered:
They are supposed to be ` without modifier, and ´ with shift, and it is the reverse in your layout.
The same with the German Austrian (no-dead-keys) layout.
In the regular German layout, this key counts as deadkey.
I do think this might be a mistake as well, but I dont know,
since I always use no-dead-keys in order to access ^ anyway. 🤷♂️
It might come across as nit picky (and probably is) but I would enjoy when the radio switches here would activate/deactivate the opposite option.
As I came across this screen the first time, I hit the libreoffice button like 5 times, and thought its simply irresponsible due to a bug. Only after I have read the second option, I saw that I had to activate an option, in order to deactivate the option I wanted. I suggest that disabling "libreoffice" enables the second radio button.
And in reverse.
I also suggest the idea, that instead of putting the "no office" option as its own, dedicated option, to instead opt out for a GTK installation at this point. I understand that you have the web browser option in Crueso, and that is nice. I still think there is room for a 'pure qt' or 'full install' option, that includes a full set of potent software to discover.
I always think, that distros leave a lot of potential on the street, by not including the most awesome and competent software that we have at our disposal. Blender, Godot and other multimedia software like Kdenlive come to my mind: To offer them all out of the box, simply gives people that are new to open source a good impression, of the potential, that they can reach with this OS.
🥳
The partitioning tab is sorely missing an option for the different file systems to be selected by the first, "install alongside" option.
Why this is missing from the most obvious choice, is beyond me.
The Spectacle program currently lacks an ability that is probably not ported yet: Ctrl+Z in the Annotation module.
I also miss the ability to directly upload images to this forum, or use a profile pic with more than 2 mb. This feels like stongeage limitations to me.
The rEFInd bootloader does provide options to start KaOS, who simply lead directly into an error. EFI/kiso/kdeosiso.efi:
Why would you offer an option, to is not intended to boot? I do like that it does include a copy of the live ISO right next to it, though. That was one of the things I always wished other distros would do as well, and seems like an obvious choice for data rescue missions and generally having a live system always at hand. Congrats!
rEFInd itself looks ugly, out of place and seems to be a second class citizen. With the language selection for the live ISO being hidden behind editing a line (really?) and that being a regression from earlier KaOS ISOs, I feel its time to focus on rEFInd on the first and primary boot manager, as this gives a more modern, and appropriate impression.
To establish a bluetooth connection between my phone and the installed system does take several attempts, because they could not find each other (Android 13) and once established, they could not send a picture in any direction.
I also do miss a rollback functionality for ZFS and btrfs in the bootloader.
Very big point to me, and a big reason why I moved away from KaOS. 🙂
