About MDU

The MDU project began its genesis in the mind of Anthony Veilleux, who had tested out 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and was very dissatisfied with the decision to replace Pidgin with Empathy as the default IM client. As removing Empathy would have broken Ubuntu, Anthony decided he wanted to build an environment from the command-line install up, choosing only the software he wanted. Initially only three lines and a single apt-get command, MDU quickly evolved to allow the user to choose the various pieces of software to be installed.

While MDU is not "minimal" in the traditional sense (that is, low hardware impact), it is decidedly slimmer than the default Ubuntu install, and takes up about two-thirds of the hard drive space (not to mention the memory gained by having certain unused services uninstalled).

The MDU project prides itself in creating a method through which the user can decide which software to be installed on their system -- before it is installed. The various choices for software include: desktop environment (GNOME and KDE supported), Web browser, IM client, e-mail client, and media player.

MDU releases every six months, in line with the Ubuntu release cycle, and support for all versions is provided by the MDU team.