Fuduntu Linux pivoting to rebase project

The Fuduntu developers have decided that their current path of producing a GNOME 2 desktop with a Fedora based distribution as a rolling release is becoming technically problematic and have "voted to end-of-life Fuduntu Linux". Fuduntu originally appeared in 2010 as a fork of Fedora designed for netbooks with power management applets and various optimisations for running on portable devices.The most recent release, Fuduntu 2013.2, appeared on 8 April.

The group cited development friction between maintaining older GTK2 based versions of applications which no longer get bug or security fixes as the current actively developed versions are based on GTK3. They also noted the now widely used systemd was apparently causing them issues as "it has become a required thing for many programs". Being unable to support the time and manpower as a small distribution to address these issues, the team have decided that Fuduntu Linux will be feature frozen from now on, with only bug and security fixes supplied and one more release, Fuduntu 2013.3, being planned. This will continue until 30 September, when the distribution is "end of lifed".

Andrew Wyatt, project founder and lead developer has said he will be stepping down after the final release. In a Google+ posting, Wyatt said he could no longer "maintain working 30+ hours a week on the project in addition to working full time to support my family". The development team have, though, decided to begin a new distribution to continue the project. No details are available, beyond the fact that they plan to rebase the Fuduntu work against another "well-established distro", as the team are are still making plans. Wyatt says he expects the team to "move forward with similar vision" and "deliver at or above the existing level of quality found in Fuduntu today".

(djwm)