Mythbuntu

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

~ the goodbye ~

Mythbuntu asked you to put a TV tuner card into a desktop computer and then make that computer the thing you watched television on. In Turkey that was an odd proposition for reasons that had nothing to do with Linux. Terrestrial broadcast here was still analog when Mythbuntu launched in 2007, and the households that recorded anything did it with the set-top box the satellite operator had handed them, so a PC in the living room was answering a question local viewers were not asking.

Where it did land, it landed as an appliance. Version 7.10 arrived on 22 October 2007 riding the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon release, and it became an official Ubuntu flavor rather than somebody's respin. The default desktop was Xfce, picked on the sensible grounds that a machine whose job is decoding video should not be spending memory on a desktop nobody is going to look at. Everything else about the install was pointed at MythTV.

The real work was in the setup. MythTV splits into a backend that owns the tuner hardware and the recordings, and frontends that play them back in other rooms, and getting those two to find each other defeated a large number of people who were perfectly capable of installing Linux. Mythbuntu's contribution was a graphical tool that asked which role this machine was taking and then configured it, which converted a weekend of reading into an afternoon.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two developers left ~

Thomas Mashos posted the end on 4 November 2016, and the reason given was the plainest one in open source. There were not enough developers. A team that had once had around ten active contributors was down to two overworked ones, and keeping a full Ubuntu flavor synchronized with the Ubuntu release cadence, through every LTS, is not a job for two people with day jobs. Mythbuntu 16.04, out on 21 April 2016, was the last release.

Nothing in that announcement blamed MythTV or Ubuntu. The flavor ended because the number of people willing to do the release work had dropped below what the release work took.

~ what stayed in the ppa ~

The interesting decision was what the team did next, which was to keep going at a smaller size. They carried on maintaining the Mythbuntu software repository and told new users to install a normal Ubuntu, then add the PPA and get MythTV from there. The advice specifically named Xubuntu, which was Mythbuntu with the Myth part taken out, so the recommendation amounted to assembling the distribution yourself in two steps.

By 2016 the hard part had been solved for years and had stopped changing much. What the flavor was still adding on top of a normal Ubuntu install came down to a package set and a pile of sensible defaults, and a repository can carry both of those without anyone cutting release images four times a year.

~ the shape it lost to ~

The home theater PC was a category of its own, and that category died on a schedule. Microsoft stopped shipping Windows Media Center with Windows 10 in 2015, two years after Samsung bought Boxee and switched its servers off. Mythbuntu going in 2016 puts it near the end of that run rather than at the start of it.

What killed all of them was the same thing, and it was not a competitor. Recording broadcast television stopped being how people got television. Once the program was on a service that streamed it whenever you wanted, the tuner card and the disk full of recordings were solving a scarcity that had quietly gone away.

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