Yesterday, DistroWatch.com made it public that the beta 1 of ROSA Marathon is available for testing. This distro is a new fork of Mandriva.Interestingly, after one day of being released, ROSA is now in the 11th position, trailing Mageia (#8 in DistroWatch).
In the Mandriva forums users speculated that ROSA is the future of Mandriva. Since the company has not provided any fresh information (except for the "interesting news" without details in a forum post last March 8th), one cannot help but wonder.
Anyway, I downloaded the .iso and, sure enough, ROSA Marathon beta1 is like the twin sister of Mandriva Desktop 2011. Of course, this is no coincidence because the developers at ROSA Labs worked with the Mandriva devs to launch the last Mandriva product there is today. However, the resemblance is absolute: this distro's booting sequence shows no difference at all (well, the logo is different), ROSA has a ROSA Control Center that is identical to Mandriva's (the icon is even the same!) and, to be honest, the only different features I saw were:
1. More polished icons (ROSA logo as a launcher)
2. The ROSA player
I admit that I did not use it much because the interface is not my cup of tea, so I'll give it another run later.
I guess Mandriva S.A. will use its distro for the business sector while ROSA will be sort of the community-developed distro. Again, this is just a guess.
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