The installer offers no guidance, but the wiki has instructions. It’s easy to use, but it hung when I accepted its offer to configure Grub. Creation of a user is done at the first boot and there’s no provision to encrypt /home. Both the live session and the boot were very slow, even by KDE standards. ROSA claims to run in 780MB, but it was using swap with 1GB.

The software includes Firefox, Thunderbird, Kopete, LibreOffice, Amorak, ROSA media player, Kolour paint, and the media codecs. Everything worked, only LibreOffice leaving a warning when launched from the CLI, complaining that it had no Java. Firefox has Яандекс as its only search engine, with predictable results. The Flash plugin is installed, but it doesn’t work.

The panel had no pager and, when I tried adding one, I found that added applets vanished when I logged out. I couldn’t discover a keyboard shortcut for the menu, nor how to add shortcuts to launch programs. ROSA has adapted the Red Hat services manager, but it only enables one to start and stop services in the current session; “enable” and “disable” are greyed out. Enabling repositories is a separate process before using the package installer, but I had no problems with installing extra software.

If you don’t need encryption, Flash, or keyboard shortcuts, and don’t mind the forum being conducted in Russian, this is a reasonable distro, but it’s difficult to recommend it over the many others offering KDE.