Fuduntu Done Now, All Hail FuSE

It wasn't two weeks ago that news broke of Fuduntu's imminent demise, but was softened a bit by promises of support and one more release. Then word began to swirl that remaining members were seriously considering basing on openSUSE. But today brought a more dire announcement.

Last week, Lee Ward shared that he and his team have decided that openSUSE would indeed be the base for their new distribution. In fact, in that same post, Ward stated that the new distro would be dubbed FuSE if Novell will allow it. He said, "We hope that FuSE Linux will be able to live up to the standard that Fuduntu held for so long. The team is currently discussing the name with SUSE to ensure that there is no legal issues to using that name. Pending confirmation that the name is in the green, it will be officially declared." FuSE is to be set up as a non-profit 501c3 with a council of team and community members. At that time, Ward thought the security and bug fixes as well as one more release of Fuduntu would be forthcoming. But alas, that is not to be.

This weekend brought the news that Fuduntu will be no more effective immediately. Ward said that most of their users have moved on anyway and the team members are already working on FuSE. There just doesn't seem to be any interest in developing Fuduntu anymore even for just a few more months. He said, "May you all find a replacement distribution that you enjoy as much as you enjoyed Fuduntu."

The first release of FuSE is projected to hit about the time the last Fuduntu was thought to be expected, towards the end of September. Developers have chosen the Consort desktop as the new face of FuSE, as long as it seems ready when they are. You may have seen Consort in SolusOS. It's a GNOME clone built with modern GTK3.

On a related note, Engadget is surely disappointed in this news as well.