I wonder if it was because nobody used it? It must have been a large thing to maintain and test every release.

It was gaining popularity at the point where they killed it; there was this real buzz, a feeling that this really cool thing was finally spreading to more people.

> It was gaining popularity at the point where they killed it

Was it? As far as I can tell, it had been losing popularity for a long time before Windows 8, and it was rare and getting rarer that any nx-based project would recommend using it on Windows, though occasionally you'd find people outside the main projects with recipes for making it work (or horror stories of their attempts to do so.)

I felt like it was. Things like the gentoo-on-windows project were new and lively, and that company that was backing it was getting a bigger and bigger set of packages in their repo.