The stable version of ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME has been released. ROSA Marathon is the latest edition of a line of distributions published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia.
Other desktop editions published by ROSA Laboratory are ROSA Marathon 2012 KDE and ROSA Marathon 2012 LXDE. Both have already been reviewed on this website. See ROSA 2012 LXDE review and ROSA Marathon 2012 review.
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. Note that ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME uses the GNOME 2, and not the GNOME 3 desktop environment. While a review is still cooking, here are a few screen shots from a test installation for your viewing pleasure.
This GNOME edition uses the same icon theme found in the KDE and LXDE editions.
And the system-wide management tools are all accessible from the ROSA Control Center, inherited from Mandriva Linux, the distribution that ROSA Linux is derived from.
The default desktop. Want to escape from the madness surrounding GNOME 3, this might be want you should be using.
The desktop with the menu showing installed Internet applications.
LibreOffice is the installed office suite.
And there are a few games installed out of the box.
With just about the right type of multimedia applications to play with.
The desktop showing the date widget.
You may download installation images for 32- and 64-bit architectures from here.
I have installed ROSA Gnome, and I like it. As a long time Mandriva and Gnome user I feel right at home. This is a long term release, meaning we can have a stable Gnome 2 desktop until 2017.
For the former Mandriva user most of the system is easy recognizable. The ROSA media player plays most music or video. System setup is as before the Mandriva way, easy and understandable. Nice someone continues the Mandriva based distro.