Nova is a Cuban state-sponsored Linux distribution launched in February 2009.[1] It was developed in Havana at the University of Information Science (UCI) by students and professors to provide free and open-source software (FOSS) to inexperienced users and Cuban institutions. While the initial version was Gentoo-based, the developers switched to Ubuntu beginning with Version 2.1.[2]
In May 2016, discussions about a new version 6.0 were underway.[3] However, by 2016, Distrowatch had marked Nova as discontinued,[4] and its website, www.nova.cu had been taken down. Nova re-entered development later, and version 8.0 was released in January-March 2022.[5]
In early 2018, its repositories and download server (repo.nova.cu) was shut down temporarily, with users being told to switch to