From masgnulinux.es
To read the original in Spanish, click here
Four years ago Chakra Linux released its last ISO image, exactly in the year 2017 and with the codename Goedel, and it can already be considered dead.
The distribution that wanted to use exclusively KDE programs as software seems to have definitively dropped. That said, it appears that there was some update between 2018-19 and an ISO image codenamed Hawking was pulled, but the links are gone. From there until today nothing has moved.
The keys
Despite the fact that some say that Chakra has been dying since the death of one of the founders, Jan Mette, the truth is that this does not even stop my head, since from the year 2010 when Jan died until 2017, Chakra has lived years of glory, albeit in a limited way, as it was never even close to a very popular distribution. Looking back a bit, the idea for Chakra came from creating an Arch-like distro with the old KDEmod tool.
It should be noted that that same year 2010, Anke Boersma was already part of the Chakra team and was working for a while longer on this distribution, together with one of the creators, later, of Manjaro.
I think the key to Chakra drift was mainly due to Anke’s abandonment. The developer wanted to create a distribution in which only she would be the only one to take care of her work, and that is how KaOS Linux was born.
Possibly, the departure of Anke Boersma with the creator of Manjaro, was the spark that triggered the rout and cooled the spirits to continue developing Chakra.
Another thing that must be taken into account and is another key, is that these types of distributions have great limitations.
The fact of focusing exclusively on a certain desktop, in advance you are making a selection of users and input is limiting. It is possible that this is the wish of who / who runs this distribution, that there will be some user, but that it is not open to all types of users. In addition, technically, we are faced with a shortage of programs and a system that could easily become unstable, since its approach is semi-rolling in the hands of very few developers (it is not the case of Arch, which is maintained by hundreds of programmers). A distribution explicitly focused on an environment with hardly any possibility of using programs that use another development kit will have a very limited niche of users. And it’s not that they didn’t exist. It was possible to install some GTK programs, but only a few.
The software that contains Chakra Linux aka Goedel is out of date. Even the Plasma desktop environment stayed at version 5.17.
And the future?
Only a miracle would be to see Chakra reborn again. There are no signs that the project will be resumed, and look what I’m looking into. To get an idea, they still have QupZilla in the repositories. Years ago QupZilla was transformed into Falkon and if Falkon today has no development …
People who like those oddities of using a single kit as a desktop environment already have KaOS and that also adds a continuous but slow development, without surprises. However, it is inevitable to ask ourselves the following question, will Anke live forever? Either she gets tired and leaves it or passes the legacy on to other people.
It’s a real shame about Chakra. In its day it was the splendor of KDE Plasma and it had no contender.
To access the Chakra website, click here