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.

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 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.

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 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.

So when an email arrived in my Inbox from the developers announcing ROSA Desktop Fresh R1, describing it as a new name distribution “based on the ROSA Fresh platform,” and that it is “targeted at advanced users and enthusiasts who will appreciate rich functionality and freshness of distribution components without serious loss of quality,” I thought, that should be an interesting distribution.

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!

The GNOME 3 edition is a community edition, not officially supported by ROSA Laboratory, though the same developers working on the officially-supported desktop editions are also responsible for this community edition.

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.