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Linux distributions seem to unfurl, and fold like sheets at a laundromat. Now, another Linux distro I liked is gone. Fuduntu was discontinued in April, just as people were saying it was the best new Linux in years.

Fuduntu was created in late 2011, by Andrew Wyatt as a fork of Fedora Linux -- a sort of Fedora for the Ubuntu desktop crowd, tweaked for netbooks, and laptops. It came with an up-to-the-minute Linux kernel, apps like Chromium, Adobe Flash and Fluendo MP3 codecs, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and VLC. It used the Gnome 2 desktop, Fedora's YUM package manager, and it was a rolling release.

By early 2013, with version 2013.1, the Fuduntu team seemed to have a winning distro -- reviewers were loving it. I kind of loved it too. But it's repositories didn't include Synapse -- You just couldn't beat Ubuntu for software choices; and I was loathe to throw away all that time I'd invested memorizing how to spell "sudo." But, Fuduntu was definitely one to watch. By March, into April, Fuduntu version 2013.2 had Netflix and Steam in the repositories, and reviewers were having to dig deep into their reserve of superlatives. Then at the end of April, on the 28th, The Fuduntu website announced that the distribution was dead. The team was starting a new distribution, based on openSUSE, initially called FUse Linux, but now renamed Cloverleaf Linux (In Canada, Cloverleaf means canned tuna, for better or worse).

What seems to have killed Fuduntu, and I don't want to get too technical here (no chance of that), wasn't the Gnome 2 Desktop Environment as I originally wrote -- and as many others have written -- but rather it was underlying code libraries, including GTK. Another factor was Systemd, a new system services manager, adopted by Fedora in 2011. Andrew Wyatt explains here ►. Wyatt actually says of the Gnome 2 DE:

We had no issue with our GNOME 2 code base; it was mature and functional, and we had no problem supporting GNOME 2 itself at-all.

Interesting post about the future of Fuduntu, now that it's not Fuduntu ►
Oh FUD! Another look at the death of Fuduntu ►