Looking at link this site the latest release of PD extend is:

Ubuntu/raring 13.04 deb http://apt.puredata.info/releases raring main

Does anyone know if a new distribution will be released? Who is maintaining these distros?

Pd-extended is currently not in development and there hasn't been a release since January 2013. On the other hand, pd vanilla and pd-l2ork are both being constantly developed.

Ok. Do you know if it will be back in development or is the package "dead"?

There were some talks about trying to revive the pd-extended package some time ago in the mailing list, but AFAIK that is quite unlikely to happen. Look, pd-extended is still used by a lot of people and it's a nice piece of software, but probably it would be better to go with pd vanilla and install those external libraries which are part of pd-extended, so you have the best of both worlds. There is also a plugin called deken which should make life much easier when it comes to installing externals to pd vanilla (see: https://github.com/pure-data/deken ). But if you are on Linux, I can't recommend enough Pd-l2Ork, my distribution of choice. It has all the libraries of pd-extended, as well as other graphical improvements (and I hear they are coming to OS X soon as well).

Cheers,
Gilberto

Hi Gilberto and thanks for very good advise. I tested "deken" and it works brilliantly, and as you say this will give me the best of two worlds. I also checked out l2Ork and this looks very interesting. However I run Ubuntu Studio 14.04 32bit at the moment and could not find a suitable package but I sent them an email asking how to best install because I really want to test this out as well. But I might consider doing an install of 14.04 64bit if that is the only option. Thanks again for the support!

My pleasure. As for using a 64-bit OS, if your computer is able to then by all means go for it!