Pardus was spawned in 2005 from a Turkish government project, which today is still run in a joint venture between the National Research Institute for Electronic and Cryptology and the community.

In Pardus 2008.2, codenamed "canus aureus", developers have improved their in-house Init System Mudur, which shortens the boot time, and the installations program Yali has also been re-worked. The modified PiSi package manager can now save download sources and continue downloads despite interruptions. It also supports Delta packages, although the first Delta packages are scheduled for later Pardus versions.

Pardus has KDE 3 in version 3.5.10 as standard desktop and the current Pardus 2.6.25 kernel with comprehensive hardware support.

Available as instalations package (Pardus Kurulan), and as live CD (Pardus Calisan), Pardus version 2008.2 comes for the first time with the brandnew KDE 4.2. The download is available here, with release notes here.