As many English-speaking users already noticed, more than a month ago we have published ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 LXDE images on our mirrors but still didn't make the announcement. We are extremely sorry for this delay and now would like to provide you some details about that release.

Foreword

LXDE, that is Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment is one of the most popular lightweight desktop environments.

In the world of user interfaces lightweight implies

If you like the ideas above, then you should definitely try LXDE which tries to implement this lightweight concept:

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Besides the user interface, one should remember that LXDE doesn't consume much resources so you can install it on your old granny's notebook and still launch Chromium or ROSA Media Player there.

Download

The LXDE R5 images can be downloaded here:

System Requirements
Release Notes

LXDE edition shares the package base with KDE and Gnome, so improvements in one flavor automatically appears in the others (if applicable).

In comparison with the previous release, the following changes appeared in ROSA Desktop Fresh R5:

As for LXDE-specific improvements, one can mention only a couple of bug fixes:

Updating From Previous Releases

If you already have ROSA Fresh LXDE R4 installed then you have nothing to worry about - your system will be automatically updated to R5 state (and even further) by means of standard update mechanism. Users of older systems (R1, R2, R3) should first update their systems to R4 (though we recommend new installation wherever possible).

Feedback

Feel free to try and provide your feedback. We have official forum monitored not only by isers but also by ROSA developers and QA team and classic bugzilla for advanced users who are able to formulate their problem in the terms that developers will easily understand. You can use this link to file a new bug against LXDE edition.

Future Directions

The ROSA Desktop Fresh LXDE R5 is based on the rosa2014.1 with guaranteed support until the 2016, Autumn. However, before that date we are planning to switch to LXQt as our main lightweight desktop environment. LXQt appeared as a united project of LXDE and RazorQT teams who decided to rewrite all LXDE in Qt.

LXQt is already available in ROSA repositories and you can try it by installing task-lxqt package.

LXQT-2015-01-21.png

There are still a lot of things to do here, but the current quality is already close to LXDE