It will be supported for four years with security fixes

Apr 21, 2017 20:02 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind the ROSA GNU/Linux operating system announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the KDE and KDE Plasma flavors of ROSA Desktop Fresh R9.

ROSA Desktop Fresh R9 is the first release in more than two years to rebase the RPM-based operating system derived from Mandriva to a newer 2016.1 platform. It comes with both the KDE 4 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments, while the GNOME 3, MATE, and LXQt variants should be out in the coming months.

"ROSA Desktop R9 is the firs release based on new packages platform 2016.1. The distributive is targeted mainly to the Linux advocates eager to try the new software versions. According to the updates policy the R9 version of the ROSA distribution will have 4 years of technical support," read the release notes.

Based on Linux kernel 4.9.20 LTS and Mesa 17.0.3

Most of the improvements implemented in the ROSA Desktop Fresh R9 release are under the hood, so we can mention that the operating system is powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9.20 kernel and features an up-to-date graphics stack based on Mesa 17.0.3 3D Graphics Library.

The new Linux 4.9 kernel series not only allows users to install the OS on the latest Intel Skylake machines but also fixes the hibernation mode on 32-bit systems. The Glibc (GNU C Library) component was patched to boost the loading of dynamic shared objects (DSO), and all the system libraries, compilers, etc. were brought up to date.

The FFMpeg multimedia framework is now patched with OpenCL support, various popular applications are now part of the main repositories as a result of them being reorganized, including the D language compiler and the powerful Meson build system, and the libinput library is now used for handling input devices in X11.

Other than that, ROSA Desktop Fresh R9 comes with the proprietary NVidia and AMDGPU PRO graphics drivers, removes support for the deprecated AMD Catalyst (fglrx) drivers, and addresses various issues reported by users from previous releases regarding the installer, booting, and the 32-bit version of Mozilla Firefox.

Download ROSA Desktop Fresh R9.