DistroWatch says that Chakra is "Dormant", what does that exactly mean?

koesherbacon · December 3, 2020, 11:17pm

Hello there, this is my first post here after deciding to check out Chakra on the quite old and rather dated advice of several other Linux forums. Anyway, when I went to check out Chakra’s info on DistroWatch.com, it says that the status of Chakra is “Dormant”.
I took a screenshot here:
Chakra-DW-Dormant

Does that mean it is no longer being developed and the most recent ISO, chakra-2017.10-goedel-x86_64.iso from way back in 2017 is the final version of Chakra altogether? And I probably shouldn’t bother giving it a LiveUSB test run, even if Chakra seems like it would be a good stepping-stone into the somewhat elitist world of Arch Linux?

I’m just looking for some input in whether or not I should really bother downloading the ISO, creating a LiveUSB, and testing Chakra out to see if I like it or not. I mean it would be a real bummer to give it a whirl, really like it, only to discover that it is no longer maintained and will never, ever, offer me anything new.

Any advice, feedback, or input you care to share would be awesome!

Thanks a lot! I hope you and your families are all staying safe and healthy during this pandemic!

ReemZ · December 6, 2020, 7:23pm

Well…Goedel isn’t the most recent ISO, there are actually four release candidates of Hawking but even those are old now, and updating from those will mean updating over half of your system again. Might be painful, might not be, YMMV. If you do get it fully updated, you’ll still have some slightly outdated packages, as devs and packagers seem very busy with other things atm, but it’ll still be a stable and workable system.

Also, there seem to be problems with keyservers, and if my (admittedly limited) understanding of it is correct, it affects more distros than just Chakra. It seems the most effective way to work around this, should you decide to install a fresh system, is to install your desired additional packages first, then updating the system - even if this is the exact opposite of the normally recommended practice.

In short: expect some tinkering, do not expect the latest version of every single package, but it’ll still be a decent system that doesn’t put too much strain on your hardware and still looks great.