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edited 2024-12-31

This hopefully won't come as a surprise to anyone (especially if you've looked recently at the code frequency graphs), but crouton has been seeing little to no feature development for quite a while now. As I have recently switched jobs, it's as good a time as ever to be a bit more intentional about the future of crouton. More details below.

It's been a fantastic 9 12 years, and could not have happened without the help of @drinkcat, @smibarber, and all of you who stepped up to be contributors. Special thanks to @DennisLfromGA who has been a phenomenal moderator and guide for the community. And considerable thanks to all of you who have been helping each other out in the issue tracker, on Reddit, and on random blog posts/videos/cat gifs across the interblogospherimetaweb3. Without you all, crouton could not have grown to the extent it did (keep in mind I have never advertised crouton anywhere!), and perhaps crostini in turn might not have come to be.

Speaking of crostini, while crouton still has its niches (especially with EOL devices), crostini development has long since surpassed crouton for convenience and performance on a majority of our use cases. I would encourage everyone to try it out and see if it works for you. If you really want a full Linux desktop environment, you can of course continue to use crouton or one of the many other (some very recent!) methods of installing common Linux distros. And if you do decide to continue to use crouton (thanks!), the issue tracker, discussion area, and wiki here on Github will continue to be open for business.

So without further ado (and this has been added to the README mostly verbatim):

🪦 crouton is now end-of-life 🪦

This means that:

  • The repo is now locked, and no further changes will be considered.
  • Eventually someone will want the latest Ubuntu added to the release list. See this commit for an example of how to do it on your own copy.
  • Sometime around July 2025, the GitHub project will be archived, making the issue tracker, discussions, and wiki read-only.
  • For the safety of users and stability of crouton's functionality for those on EOL devices, offers to take over the dnschneid/crouton repo or extension will be declined, and requests to change link destinations will be rejected.