The first and last Release Candidate of ROSA Desktop 2012 was announced last week. This means, of course, that the stable edition will be hitting a download mirror near you very soon, likely before Xmas.

There is ROSA Marathon and ROSA Desktop. According to the Release Notes, ROSA Marathon is designed for enterprise, SMB and SOHO users who do not need bleeding-edge applications and technologies. ROSA Desktop is for personal use, and the 2012 edition is still being baked, slated for release sometime at the end of the year.

ROSA Desktop is a Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Desktop and developed by ROSA, a technology outfit based in Moscow, The Russian Federation. ROSA Desktop 2012 beta is the first pre-release edition of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012. It is supposed to be a Long Term Support (LTS) edition, with a 5-year support period.

This is a community-supported edition from ROSA Lab developers that has not been officially sanctioned by ROSA Laboratory, though there is an ongoing discussion to make it and other desktop editions official spins or editions.

I’ve been running ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 beta 1 on a test system since it was released on October 20 2012. When the stable edition was made available for download, I didn’t need to reinstall, just updated the system. This review is based on that system, with screen shots from it and a couple of test installations in a virtual environment.

Aside from ROSA Desktop, which is intended for private desktop users, the company also publishes a desktop edition for enterprise or business users, and has already announced plans for a ROSA Enterprise Server and ROSA Cloud Platform editions.

The list of planned features is very long and includes many UX and UI additions, improvements and bugfixes, but the two that I am looking forward to the most are KLook and StackFolder, two features already available by default on ROSA Marathon 2012 and also in ROSA Desktop 2012 beta.

ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME is likely the last of the enterprise-class editions to be published before the release of a personal desktop edition later this year.

This Release Candidate of what will become ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME uses the GNOME 2, and not the latest GNOME 3 desktop environment.