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Mythbuntu busted as last two devs working on media centre distro quit

This will not be the year of Linux on the media centre desktop, after all

The developers behind Mythbuntu, a Linux distribution dedicated to melding the open source digital video recorder MythTV with Ubuntu Linux, have called it quits.

The project's death notice offers a simple reason for the distro's demise: the team working on it has shrunk from ten to just two, the remaining maintainers want to get on with their lives and just don't have time to do the distro right.

“Although we have automated as much as we can, the effort to both fix issues that pop up from underlying changes and release an ISO is more than the team can support in our free time” writes maintainer Thomas Mashos.

“Our time has just been spread so thin for so long that something had to give.”

The decision means that Mythbuntu ISOs will soon be hard to find and updates will cease. Myth TV is a discrete project and there is no evidence it will cease any time soon. Users will be heartened to learnt hat the Mythbuntu has promised that “MythTV packages in the official repositories and the Mythbuntu PPA will continue to be available and updated at their current rate.”

The project's demise is another example of an open source project running out of steam: Apache Open Office was recently revealed as struggling to maintain a critical mass of developers.

Or perhaps Mythbyntu's demise is just a case of something better coming along, like Kodi on the Raspberry Pi, which offers a very decent media centre to run on cheaper and rather more loungeroom-friendly hardware than a conventional PC. ®

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