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.

The first beta of this LXDE edition of ROSA Linux was released in mid-April (this year). That beta release was previewed here. This article provides a more detailed review using a 32-bit installation image. The boot options are shown in the image below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The alpha version of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012 has been made available for download. It comes about a week later than planned, but that is no big deal. The most important thing is that it is here. Let the bug hunting begin!