Fuduntu
Fuduntu was based on Fedora and created in 2010. It somewhere filled the niche between Fedora and Ubuntu, hence the name. After a year of development, Fuduntu was forked directly from Fedora. It had some packages not officially in fedora, therefore it was no longer considered a spin-off. Fuduntu gained popularity among many users. However, in April 2013, it was decided that the team couldn’t continue development and they decided to move to a newer project called the CloverLeaf, based on OpenSuse. But they stopped development on that too. All of this ended with their news blog going down and this marked the death of Fuduntu.
Apricity
Apricity was one of the most famous Arch based distros. Apricity was very famous among arch newbies who wanted to use the arch in a simpler way. The UI was the best part of Apricity with a mix of Cinnamon and Gnome.apricity It was in beta for some time but in its first year of stable releases, it got shelved. The main reason behind Apricity OS’s sudden end was cited insufficient time. Here is a quote from the website’s page.
Backtrack
Backtrack was truly the first choice for security testers all over the world. Based on Knoppix OS, backtrack project started in 2006 and released its last offering the Backtrack r5 in 2012.backtrack The backtrack project had to be shut down and moved to the Kali Linux project. This happened because the team wanted a strong and rolling base to work on. The work on Backtrack was stopped and the newer Kali OS based on Debian was launched in 2013. Since many users heavily relied on Backtrack, making the switch was not easy.
Cub Linux
Originally known as Chromixium OS, Cub Linux was an attempt bringing the desktop functionalities of the Chrome OS by Google. Due to requests from Google to rename the project to avoid confusions, it was later renamed to Cub Linux. Based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the distro used various tools from LXDE, Gnome, XFCE and many others for customizing its desktop. At the end of 2016, the official website for Cub Linux disappeared mysteriously. There has been no announcement at all after that.
Feather Linux
Feather was based on Knoppix and was an extremely light operating system similar to DSL(Damn Small Linux). The system could run entirely on ram due to its size which was 64MB only. The most recent release from Feather Linux is from April 2007. According to Distrowatch, Feather Linux is officially dead.
Conclusion
A lot of famous distributions have stopped development due to low funding or lack of manpower. Some of these get picked by other teams that want to continue the project, but mostly it is a dead end.
