It's Goodbye to CrunchBang, or is It?
Two main stories dominated the headlines today in a good news, bad news fashion. Good news is that new highly anticipated Ubuntu smartphone will see a limited release. The bad news is CrunchBang creator and lead maintainer Philip Newborough today announced the end of the project. Elsewhere, Manuel Jose today said that new PapyrOS could be a big win for the Linux community and Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS update is delayed two weeks.
Philip Newborough today announced the end of his Linux project that produced the fairly popular CrunchBang distribution. A few years back it seemed like a post would pop up every few days praising CrunchBang but Newborough said today that it was time to call it quits. "When progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is something that I need to leave behind." He said his users would be better off using vanilla Debian nowadays. Once upon a time CrunchBang filled a niche but today there are other more popular choices according to Newborough. He said of CrunchBang, "I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value." So the community bids adieu to yet another favorite...
Or do we? Larry "the CrunchBang guy" Cafiero just may pick up the mantle. Larry posted today that he's very saddened to see the end of CrunchBang and that post would be his last as well. But then he said, "I’m not quite ready to call it a day. In fact, I pretty much fancy keeping the sun from setting on CrunchBang. At SCALE 13x this month, I will hold a CrunchBang Fork Birds of a Feather gathering to see if there is an interest in continuing Philip's work as he left it." So, it may not be the end after all.
Another whole group of folks are celebrating today because news is all over that Ubuntu's smartphones will finally hit online store shelves in a "series of Flash Sales over the coming weeks." Sales will be announced on social media "within the next week." The 190 USD smartphone will ship with a 4.5 inch screen, five and eight megapixel cameras, 1.3 GHz MediaTek Quad Core Cortex A7, and one gigabyte of RAM. LinuxGizmos.com has a nice write-up of it today.
In other Ubuntu news, Softpedia.com covered the Ubuntu 14.04.2 update delay today. The updated Long Term Support release is now expected February 19. Developers have been busy working on the smartphone and Ubuntu 15.04 delaying tests on new kernel updates according to Softpedia.com.
It's always good to hear of a new Linux distribution, even if it's an Android clone. According to Manuel Jose, "The upcoming PapyrOS is trying to build an entirely new Linux distro (based on Arch Linux) which will have Android 5.0's now famous material-design inspired look and feel." He then went on to say, "If PapyrOS materializes and manages to achieve even half of what it set out to, it is going to be a big win for the community." Jose posted several screenshots and concluded, "Looks pretty darn good so far."
And finally today, in another bit of good news, Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) creator posted yesterday that he may have to abandon the project due to money problems. Well, barely 24 hours later, money is no longer an issue at least for a while. See ArsTechnica.com's full story on this.