14 DAY TRIAL // The developers behind the ROSA GNU/Linux operating system have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 LXQt edition of the project.
Previous releases of the ROSA Desktop Fresh Linux OS used the popular LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) project as the main user interface for their lightweight offering, but now it seems that there's a trend in switching over to the next-generation version of the desktop environment, LXQt.
"Up to Desktop Fresh R5, we used to release lightweight editions on the basis of LXDE. However, LXDE is based on GTK+2 library stack which didn't get significant updates since the year 2011 - all new features are now implemented in the GTK+3 series," says Denis Silakov.
Most of the apps have Qt ports
Built with Qt 5 GUI toolkit framework, the latest version of the LXQt desktop environment is 0.10.0, and it is the base of the ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 LXQt edition. It brings users almost all the apps that were available in the LXDE flavor of the distro, such as the PCManFM file manager, qpdfview PDF viewer, or qmmp audio player.
However, not all the LXDE apps have Qt ports, so they had to keep some GTK+ programs in the distribution, such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the LibreOffice office suite. Additionally, the LXQt desktop environment ships with its own Control Center app, in addition to ROSA's in-house built configuration tools.
Powered by Linux kernel 4.1 LTS
Last but not least, ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 LXQt is powered by kernel packages from the long-term supported Linux 4.1 LTS series, and it now uses the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) project as the default display manager. Download the ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 LXQt Live ISO images right now from Softpedia.
The ROSA developers recommend that you install the ROSA Desktop Fresh R6 LXQt on a 32-bit or 64-bit computer powered by an Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron processor, a minimum of 256MB of RAM - though 512MB is recommended after installation, and 384MB when using the OS in Live mode - as well as at least 6GB of free disk space.
