14 DAY TRIAL // On August 2, 2016, the ROSA Labs was more than happy to inform us about the availability of the ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 GNU/Linux operating system designed especially for Russian-speaking users.
Based on the latest ROSA 2014.1 platform, the ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Linux distribution ships with new flavors featuring the KDE 4, KDE Plasma 5, GNOME, and MATE desktop environments, and two years of extended support, which means that you'll receive software updates and security patches until fall 2018.
Unfortunately, ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 doesn't ship with the latest software versions and GNU/Linux technologies that are now popular amongst various distros. All four editions ship with the long-term supported Linux 4.1.25 kernel (the latest version is Linux kernel 4.1.29 LTS), but kernels from the Linux 4.4 LTS and Linux 4.6 series are installable from the main software repositories.
Among other components included in ROSA Desktop Fresh R8, we can mention Mesa 11.2.2 3D Graphics Library, PulseAudio 8.0 sound server, NetworkManager 1.2.2 network connection manager, Chromium 51.0 and Mozilla Firefox 46.0.1 web browsers, Mozilla Thunderbird 38.6 email and news client, LibreOffice 5.1.4 office suite, Qt 5.6.1 GUI toolkit, as well as the FFMpeg 2.8.7 and GStreamer 1.6.3 multimedia frameworks.
Skype, Steam, SoftMaker Office, and Viber are in the repos
Also new in the ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 operating system is an updated version of the Pale Moon web browser, version 26.3.3, the KDE Frameworks 5.24.0 release for the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment, and new video drivers to offer better support for various Nvidia graphics cards, Nvidia 361.42 and 364.15. It also looks like proprietary software like Skype, Viber, SoftMaker Office, and Steam is now installable from the main repositories.
There are also a lot of changes in multiple desktop environment-independent components, so we recommend that you check out the changelog below for more details. Also below, we've attached a screenshot gallery to see the ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 operating system in action for each of its flavors. In the meantime, you can download ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 right now via our website, where you'll find Live ISO images for 64-bit and 32-bit computers.
