iTWire previously covered the frustration felt by key contributor, Andrew Wyatt. Wyatt is better known as Fewt and is the developer of Eee PC utilities and Eee PC Tray, important components of Eeebuntu.

Fewt didn’t hold back as he complained that each new release by Canonical Software breaks compatibility with the ASUS Eee addons. “Ubuntu sucks,” he said.

Such negative statements no doubt came at an unfortunate time for Canonical, with Karmic Koala being mere days away from release.

Fewt's views were not merely his own. The Eeebuntu team recently made a forum posting explaining the team has, as a whole, opted to abandon Ubuntu as the base for their distribution and switch to Debian Unstable instead.

The team believes this will give greater flexibility in what is released, and will make updates available to users as they arise rather than a fixed bi-annual schedule.

Given Ubuntu is itself based on Debian this is an endorsement of the base Linux platform but at the same time an implicit rejection of the configuration choices made by Ubuntu on behalf of end users.

Additionally, the Eeebuntu team has taken this opportunity to increase the scope of their work from netbooks to also cover desktops in general. No further details have been given yet and so it is not clear if this refers to the ASUS Eeebox line or something more general.

The first Debian-based release of Eeebuntu – Eeebuntu 4.0 – is so far expected to be released at the end of December this year.