14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux distribution ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 KDE has been announced by the ROSA company and is now available for download.
ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 is the fourth in the series and uses one of the latest KDE versions. It's a distribution that aims to please a lot of users, even the ones who come from a Windows ecosystem.
The previous version of this distribution was released back in April, so the developers had a lot of time to improve upon the operating system. That doesn't mean that ROSA changed too much. From a design point of view it's still pretty much the same, but many of the included packages have been updated.
ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 users can get a newer KDE
Even if the distribution comes with KDE 4.13.3, which is an older release, users can still get the latest one, 4.14.1, from the KDE backports repo.
"The distro presents a vast collection of games and emulators and the Steam platform package along with standard suite of audio and video communications software including the newest version of Skype. All modern video formats are supported. The distribution includes the fresh LibreOffice v4.3.1, the full TeX suite for true nerds as well along with best Linux desktop publishing, text editing and polygraphy WYSISYG software. The LAMP/C++/... development enviroments are waiting to be installed by true hackers."
"ROSA Fresh R4 is based on a new rosa2014.1 platform which will be supported for 2 years and will serve as a base for several future releases," read the release notes. This means that the support for this branch of ROSA will end in 2016, which is a long time for Linux OS.
Other packages that have been included by default in ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 KDE are Firefox 32.0.2, Mozilla Thunderbird 31.0, Clementine 1.2.3, VLC 2.1.5, XBMC 13.2, Digikam 4.3.0, LibreOffice 4.3.1, and FFMpeg 2.3.3. These are just a few of the new updates, but there are actually hundreds more.
The Linux kernel used is 3.14.15, which is the most advanced LTS revision available right now. The devs have also said that the NVIDIA proprietary drivers are available by default, including for some of the older models.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of features. You can download ROSA Desktop Fresh R4 KDE right now from Softpedia. It's possible to test it in VirtualBox, so it might be a good idea to start there before installing it on a regular machine.
