ROSA Marathon 2012 officially presented on May 14th, 2012

This is a distro that could give Ubuntu a run for its money in terms of desktop mind share and market share.

Looking forward to the review Caitlyn; in fact ROSA was among the distros I recommended on DW this week for attention. I'm hoping it will prove to be better than the latest Mandriva, which, for me at least, was a disappointment.

I agree with you about Mandriva 2011. ROSA Labs have been distancing themselves from Mandriva in more ways than one. One little hint: the drakxtools from Mandriva aren't in ROSA Desktop 2012. They are (with only one or two exceptions) completely gone.

I'm actually more interested in their Rosa TV solution, which I'm guessing is a rebranding of MythTV or a VLC with VDR combination. But, their regular distro looks like a nice, clean KDE implementation.

Before I download it, does it have Gnome 3.4 or 3.2?

It's KDE...

I am asking about repos.

If someone has downloaded it, they could give you the location of the report servers, and you could search for the included file lists.

@GERGE,

This should have some info. for you

RosaLab

Edited:

In case you missed it (it's on the same line as item 3 of may be in the future)

4. ROSA 2012 Marathon LiveCD Gnome Free Edition for i586 and x86_64 architectures.

Hmmm, Is it time to start certifying Linux Distros?

Some of them are already certifiable.

Quoting:Some of them are already certifiable.

True, and what I meant is "a clean bill of health".

I think It is becoming a necessity since not everyone is qualified, can, or able to do that.

It says Gnome, I've seen that but there is no information about the version. That is what I am asking.

But I have learned it, ROSA has Gtk+ 2.24.5 so that means Gnome 2, right?

Quoting:ROSA has Gtk+ 2.24.5 so that means Gnome 2, right?

Not necessarily, Gtk are tools & libraries per quote below, they could be used by both Gnome 2 & 3. Edited: But I believe there is a Gtk 3.0 that is used by Gnome 3.

Quoting:GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites.

As of now there is no GNOME in the repositories. If you want GNOME then ROSA is the wrong distro for you.

But they are working on an LXDE version.

I tried the LXDE beta it was buggy but looked great, it will be one to watch.

I agree with you, Koriel. However, their latest blog post demoted the LXDE variant from an official version to a "community" version. As a company ROSA Labs is only supporting KDE.

@GERGE: The GNOME packages are now in the repository. It's GNOME 2.32. There is still no GNOME 3. I don't expect there will be.

They also have LXDE, Enlightenment, IceWM and WindowMaker packages. There is an Xfce folder as well but it isn't properly populated yet.

Just installed ROSA - seems to be Mandriva 2011 without all the bugs and with a Russian accent (noticeable in Firefox at least). Looks good and stable so far, though not without some quirks.

ROSA has an awful lot of unique apps and design bits. As far as quirks are concerned, the bugs and issues I found were mainly related to the installer. Oh, and yes, the wrong default language/locale in Firefox. Once installed and configured it is very stable. One thing I did notice is that while the beta had a lot of Mandriva 2011 packages in the repository those have largely been replaced with updated ROSA 2012 packages. It's forked from Mandriva, yes, but it's fairly far removed from Mandriva 2011 at this point.