The team in charge of maintaining and developing Fuduntu, a Linux-based operating system designed as a hybrid of Fedora and Ubuntu, voted Sunday to close down the project.
However, with the exception of Fuduntu founder and lead developer Andrew Wyatt -- who says he will retire -- the team will start a new distribution, with the idea of rebasing it against another popular Linux flavor.
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The decision was made, according to an official blog post, in part because the GNOME 2 desktop environment used by Fuduntu is becoming less well-supported than in the past.
"Apps using GTK2 have been moved to GTK3 and old versions are no longer being maintained for either bugs or security flaws," wrote communications head Lee Ward. "In addition to this, the move of the Linux world to systemd has caused a problem for Fuduntu as it has become a required thing for many programs, but we do not use it. Together with the GTK issue, Fuduntu has reached an impasse."
Ward added that an IRC meeting next week would be held as a public forum to discuss the direction of the successor distribution. The 2013.3 (Fuduntu uses a quarterly release cycle) version will be the last one, and Fuduntu will officially shut down Sept. 30.
Network World blogger Bryan Lunduke says that Fuduntu's key advantage is its careful optimization for lower-power devices -- a potentially significant benefit in an increasingly mobile-focused market.
"It does a bunch of little things to reduce the usage of swap files and tmp folders (it even moves /tmp entirely to a ram disk). Which is a big benefit for SSD's (as it reduces the total number of disk writes) and low powered machines (like the early Netbooks)," he says, adding that the follow-on distribution could retain these tweaks.
Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.
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