Fuduntu

» see fuduntu.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The post went up on the project blog on 28 April 2013, under the title "Project Ends", signed with Andrew Wyatt's handle. "After monitoring project activity and traffic and also reviewing all of the feedback from the community concerning our EOL I have decided to end the project effective today." The post above it in the archive is called "Meeting held April 21", so the team had been arguing about it for a week.

Fuduntu had launched on 7 November 2010 as a remix of Fedora 14, and the name is a portmanteau of the two distributions it was trying to sit between. The project never lived it down. It later cut loose from Fedora entirely and went rolling-release. The engineering it was actually proud of was unglamorous and specific: power management through the Jupiter applet, and /tmp and /var/log moved into a RAM disk so a netbook spent less of its battery spinning or writing.

What made it a cause rather than a hobby was the desktop. Fedora went to GNOME 3 and Ubuntu went to Unity. Fuduntu stayed on GNOME 2 and GTK 2, for people who wanted the thing they already had. That position was tenable for about two years. The reason given at the end was the one everybody had seen coming. Wider support had moved to GTK 3 and to systemd, and a volunteer project cannot carry a toolkit on its own.

I never installed it. Hardly anybody had, by then. The unusual part is that the number comes from the project itself rather than from somebody's estimate afterwards.

~ the record ~

~ two thousand five hundred ~

"By my calculations we have less than 2,500 users left, with those numbers continuing to drop by the day." Wyatt wrote that in the same paragraph where he closed the project, and that single line carries most of the rest. A month earlier, on 28 March 2013, a review titled "Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right" had taken 77 points and 63 comments on Hacker News. The closing announcement took 23 points and 11 comments from the same audience four weeks later.

Then there is the detail that nobody designing a shutdown would think to specify. "As the project ends, you will receive an update that disables the Fuduntu stable repository." The last package the distribution ever pushed had one job, and that job was to switch off the channel the packages came down. People who chose to keep running it would stop seeing errors from a server that was going to stop answering.

Sixty-one comments ran under the post. Some of them ask practical questions and get practical answers: the repositories would stay up until July, when the hosting account expired, and the sources were going to SourceForge. The forum was frozen rather than deleted, waiting to be handed to whoever came next. One commenter had installed Fuduntu that week, on an old laptop, specifically because it was not GNOME 3.

~ the successor lasted four months ~

Most of the team had already moved on to a new project before the announcement, first under the name FuSE and then as Cloverleaf Linux, this time built on openSUSE instead of Fedora. It was discontinued in late August 2013, about four months after the thing it replaced, for a shortage of people and for problems around the lightweight KDE desktop it had been betting on.

fuduntu.org still resolves. It serves a site called Synthetic Autonomic Mind now, with no connection to the distribution or to anybody who built it.

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