There’s been a lot of development early this year, like the 0.5 release. I thought there was a lot of activity, at least earlier in the year.
I personally stopped adding anything more to my custom image (which I liased a lot with the devs to cross implement features) around March/April because it basically got to the point where it didn’t need anything more, but needed more testing.
Essentially, the gameshell became more of a community collaboration hack device. It’s still being developed by community members now!
Probably the most interesting recent developments is the Godot launcher.
One of my favourite advances is the minimal launcher here, built from the ground up.
One that I think deserves a lot more love and attention is the Arch Linux OS release. It’s super feature packed and quick; again built from the ground up.
And of course, I gotta plug my own custom OS, hoping to be the most up to date complete “vanilla” experience of the dev’s official release, including a lot of hand picked community enhancements pre installed. It also has all of the dev’a official updates applied, but is by no means a lightweight image. Basically an out of box zero setup experience. (Besides the flicker hot fix that you know about)
It’s very much alive. Just I think people are all waiting for the dev term, and any future hardware development of the gameshell mainboard. I guess you could almost say, the cpi3.1 board has reached maturity enough to be considered completely supported by its operating system.