The "Most Beautiful & Performant" Linux Distro Failed

At the beginning of 2013 I wrote about an ambitious Linux distribution that set out to create what its lead developer called would be the most robust, beautiful, and performant Linux operating system out there and ultimately aspired to take on Ubuntu. Well, that distribution is now a matter of the past.

The founder of the Sprezzatech consulting firm, Nick Black, was working on the SprezzOS Linux distribution and carried three principles of advancing computing, making it beautiful, and pragmatism. The initial release wasn't anything too exciting to us, but the lead developer was saying in emails to us he was hoping to take on Ubuntu and had a showboat of other plans to make the distribution perform well and look beautiful.

In the news since that announcement was a 120 second server install for a virtual machine using SprezzOS and much automation. It was also ZFS-capable and the disk management/preparation was based upon existing open-source software but what the developer believed to be "the finest solution for these tasks to be found in any Linux installer."

In March we then heard about the SprezzOS Raptorial project, which aimed to be a modern rewrite of Debian's APT with a design for parallelism and project art. The initial numbers were positive for Raptorial compared to the upstream APT software and the work on it continued.

The last SprezzOS news passed along via Phoronix was in April when Nick was still working towards a faster Debian APT.

Now at the end of 2013, less than one year after we initially shared the new Linux distribution, the project has failed. Well, it actually looks like the project ceased back in October.

There's a Sprezzatech blog post indicating that Sprezzatech and SprezzOS are being put aside. Basically, SprezzOS wasn't being funded and Sprezzatech wasn't working out as a consulting firm so the developer quit and is going back to a normal job. For anyone interested in where the project left off, there is the SprezzOS Wiki.