
CrunchBang Linux: The end - _JamesA_
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=38916
======
slfnflctd
What a bummer. CrunchBang succeeded more for me in the first install attempt
on older, weirder hardware than any other distro I tried (including things
like Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux or even Debian with defaults). I have it
set up as a dual-boot 'failsafe' OS on a couple old WinXP machines, one of
which I use daily.

For getting up & running quickly with minimal hassle, while still being rich
in features _and_ easy for noobs on basic tasks, I have found nothing that
compares-- not sure what I'm going to replace it with yet, would love it if
anyone has suggestions.

~~~
smellf
People keep on suggesting Mint and Xubuntu, but I don't feel like LXDE or XFCE
are really effective replacements for openbox.

A quick distrowatch search led me to wattOS[0] - anyone have experience with
it? The blog has no updates since May of last year - maybe they're waiting for
Jessie to go stable before rolling out their next version?

I think I'm going to give it a try tonight.

[0]
[http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wattos](http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wattos)

~~~
philsnow
I've only ever in my life used Slackware and vanilla Debian on my personal
machines and I've never understood the distro-hopping that people seem to do.

Why would you do a distro search to find another distro that offers openbox,
isn't absolutely everything an apt-get / emerge / pacman / yum / nix-update /
whatever away ?

~~~
smellf
Yes, and I've gone that route before - install Debian, install openbox,
install your panel and networkmanager and all the other little desktop
utilities and get them configured and working together as you wanted and
skinned to look ok together. But that's a lot of work, and starting from
Crunchbang I can get a system where I want it a lot faster.

I also don't get the distro hopping, my path was Debian -> Crunchbang for
desktops shortly after wheezy went stable. But if Crunchbang development is
ceasing, then soon I'll need to move on to something else. I may try to get
some variation of the #! config ported to jessie. Maybe I'll even package and
release it, who knows.

------
laydros
I had a feeling this was coming, based on the fact Corenominal is mostly
running Jessie with Gnome in some of his recent posts, and the lack of
development around the Jessie based version.

I think Corenominal is a stand-up guy in general, and great for the GNU/Linux
community. I think he is also leaving the project at the right time, before he
has to face the demons of init that are in Jessie, and now that vanilla debian
with xfce or lxde is much closer to the user-friendly and complete desktop
that #! was so great for.

All that positive stuff said, this kinda sucks. I was really looking forward
to the next version. I agree with many others that it isn't pointless yet,
there still isn't anything quite as polished while still being super
lightweight.

------
jblow
I have great respect for anyone who undergoes a big project. So I am sad that
this project is coming to an end, and I hope his future endeavors go well.

 _But_.

From my perspective as someone who keeps going back to Linux and trying to use
it every 18 months or so, the #1 problem today is that there are _WAY_ too
many distros -- and as a result, all of them are broken. What really needs to
happen is for the Linux community to put a great deal of elbow grease into a
small number of distros.

Because I only try Linux every year or two (and give up on it every time), I
see isolated snapshots of how usable the OS is, and from my perspective, it's
gotten less stable and less usable over the past 5 years. (Six months ago I
had to try 4 different distros before one would even install correctly on one
of my two test laptops, for example).

In terms of mainstream distros that are actively trying to appeal to end-users
(not counting fringe research projects), how many is enough to provide good
variety? I am thinking 3-5 maybe?

Instead, this is the situation:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions)

Does anyone think that is an efficient way to produce quality results?

Edit: It's also worth keeping in mind that the Wikipedia list is sort of the
_minimal_ list of versions. For example, if you go to the Linux Mint homepage,
you get 4 different versions to choose from:
[http://www.linuxmint.com/](http://www.linuxmint.com/)

------
sauere
This is sad. I am using CB on my Notebooks and i love it. It's preconfigured
setup was the perfect sweet spot between a Debian-minimal install and the
somewhat "bloated" big distros out there.

~~~
phaer
What's so "bloated" about Debian with task-lxde-desktop, or task-xfce-desktop?

~~~
dewarrn1
Not bloat, configuration. That is, I suspect the parent comment is not
suggesting that these Debian installations are bloated, but that their default
configuration leaves much to be desired.

In my own use, I found Crunchbang to have the UX polish of a large distro with
the overhead of a minimal distro. An excellent combination that will be
greatly missed.

~~~
phaer
What exactly are you missing? I found the desktop-task-packages on Debian
testing quite usable without any configuration. If you haven't tried them for
a year or two or if you just tested the stable release, I can recommend to
take a fresh look at testing/the upcoming Jessie release. It has become much
more polished over the last year or two.

~~~
morganvachon
I can only speak for myself, but I'm a big fan of Openbox when it's set up
properly. Before I discovered Crunchbang, I would burn many hours getting
Openbox to the way I liked it, installing certain packages and tweaking
settings until I was exhausted from the effort. But in the end, I had a setup
that got out of my way and let me focus on work.

When I discovered Crunchbang, I was blown away. about 90% of what I set up for
myself was already done here, with a slightly different theme and a few
different default apps of course. But I found that with just an hour or so of
tweaking I could get Crunchbang to the same state I would spend a weekend
trying to get to on another distro. The differences between Crunchbang
defaults and my own were usually improvements, and I decided to switch to
better apps after giving them a go in Crunchbang (from Gedit to Geany for
editing for example).

------
cms07
I used CrunchBang for quite a while, and it's sad to see it go, but I
completely understand why the maintainer doesn't want to do it anymore, even
though I disagree with his statement that CrunchBang no longer has value.

------
darkFunction
Oh man. CrunchBang is my go-to distro when I need something lightweight that
just works out of the box. The default install is a great, well-featured
system.

------
perturbation
Posting from a Crunchbang desktop - not the best thing to be the first thing
to read as I get up in the morning.

I expect I'll be able to do some apt-repo magic and switch over to Debian when
the next stable release comes out, but I hope there's not too much breakage
when I do.

~~~
therealidiot
I tried updating a #! (Wheezy) system to Debian Jessie a while back. Massive
breakage.

~~~
laydros
Yeah, I've done it, and it is harsh. Easier to do a clean Jesse install and
manually set things up. Basically you would want the dotfiles from /etc/skel
on a crunchbang install, and then several of the custom scripts (I think from
/usr/bin) like conky-wonky, cb-printers, etc. A bunch start with cb-.

~~~
phillc73
I've just rebuilt my #! laptop last week. I can't remember what I did to break
it now, but I did. Anyway, I installed vanilla #! Waldorf, updated sources to
Jessie, commented out Waldorf sources and dist-upgraded.

No really major dramas. Run cb-printers before the upgrade to Jessie. Icons do
screw up a bit, but easily fixed by installing some similar Gnome 3 icon
themes. I'm using cb-waldorf-xoraxiom and "Grey-Icons" at the moment.
Everything else seems to work fine.

I really like the #! Openbox experience and have yet to find anything quite
like it. I did try Archbang during this re-build process, but wasn't convinced
on first viewing. I know I could just install Debian and Openbox myself, but
then have to spend a lot of extra time setting up menus, conky etc.

I'll miss #!, as I've really enjoyed it over the last three years. I've no
reason to install anything else right now, but in six months I suppose I'll go
elsewhere.

~~~
aaren
I dist-upgraded to Jessie from my working Waldorf system (using now). It was a
little faffy, but not too bad.

One problem I've got is black internal borders on some of my menus (e.g.
network-manager panel menu), but it doesn't affect me much and I really can't
be bothered to read the docs to sort it out. Any ideas?

This was the good thing about Crunchbang: a lightweight debian install that
looked good and needed hardly any configuration to work well.

------
novalis78
Crunchbang is my most favorite distribution. For the last 2 years I found it
perfect for my needs, especially on slightly older machines. Originally I came
from SuSe, moved on to Red Hat and Fedora, then played with Gentoo for a
while. Ubuntu is great, but with each version the out-of-the-box experience
became less and less desirable. Crunchbang (which I discovered on HN, btw) was
minimalist (but not painfully so) and shared Ubuntu's robustness.

~~~
novaleaf
as the article mentions, give debian a try. It's everything you just described
about crunchbang.

~~~
wooger
Apart from things like: * WiFi on my x230 in Wheezy doesn't work ootb, it does
in Crunchbang. * Install debian and openbox and you get a barely configured
desktop without a panel, with no power management, no network applet, no
decent fonts etc.

It takes a bunch of work to get Debian up to the level of Crunchbang, enough
to put off novice users.

~~~
novalis78
any suggestions besides Lubuntu and Xubuntu? Something that's closer to the
simplicity and "just working" state of crunchbang?

~~~
smellf
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009691)

------
macco
I was a humble #! user for some time. But thinking about it, this little
distros a getting less important, cause the big ones got a lot better.

Thinking about it, it is a good thing the #! creator focuses on someting
different/new. We have to many distros anyway.

~~~
anonbanker
I consider everything running systemd as one distro. That leaves about five
distros left, in total.

------
nailer
As a mid-level Unix person (around 18 years) I'd heard 'hash bang' and
'shebang' but never 'crunch bang' to describe the interpreter before.

I wonder where the term 'crunch' for pound/hash came from?

Edit: looks like it's been around a while: [http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-
pronounce.html](http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html)

------
LukeB_UK
Google cache because their site seems to be struggling:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php%3Fid%3D38916)

~~~
ipavl
It's also cross-posted here: [https://corenominal.org/blog/the-
end](https://corenominal.org/blog/the-end)

------
muyuu
AFAIK he made no money whatsoever out of it. If it's not necessary for him any
more, and doesn't make him any value, it's hardly difficult to understand he
doesn't want to continue working on it.

------
johnatwork
To me #! was quite good for my needs, I'm quite sad to see it go. As someone
who's not quite adept at using Linux, it was configured enough that I wasn't
lost following instructions.

I will surely miss it.

------
ethagnawl
I've been running #! for the last 1.5 years and it's been a pleasure to work
with.

Many thanks to @corenominal and the other contributors for their efforts over
the last few years.

------
samspenc
I never used CrunchBang, but heard quite a bit about it, and like an big open
source user/supporter, I'm sorry to see CrunchBang go.

But honest question: with the rise of Ubuntu, Debian and a few other "alpha"
Linux versions, does it make sense to put in effort and keep an alternative
Linux version running? I've always toyed with making my own Ubuntu variant
with custom window manager, but never got around to it.

~~~
valarauca1
Building on top of Debian or Ubuntu is challenging. Debian is very strict
about non-free packages, and normally tries to avoid them, and will even gut
non-free binaries from their code. This is an issue when making a distro. If
you stick purely with Debian you'll get the Linux-Libre kernel, not the proper
kernel. Which really hurts a lot of hardware support, or performance in some
scenarios.

Ubuntu has a lot of custom packages baked in. These can be stripped but
they'll make building on top of the platform difficult. Also the init system
differences are challenging + all the weird X stuff they do with Unity.

Generally if you want to roll your own distro start with a solid foundation of
Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch. Something that isn't picky about its packages, and
has less of a moral or business agenda.

~~~
willvarfar
CrunchBang was Debian-based, right?

~~~
theandrewbailey
#! was Ubuntu based for a long time before it transitioned to Debian in 2011.

------
ykzrtj
A real waste. So I'll go ahead with my eulogy. #! to me was more than an
operating system or Debian with slick OpenBox configs. #! was the community,
the aesthetics. It represented a bold idea and executed it flawlessly. I
really hope the community can take on the mantle, and trudge on. I disagree
that #! has no more value. On the contrary, I think its value was already
starting to increase in the recent years.

------
arca_vorago
I really liked CrunchBang, especially the setup scripts, which I think
shouldn't be too hard to port over to a debian minimal install anyway.

For those of you looking for similar alternatives, ArchBang is pretty awesome,
but I have been increasingly interested in Alpine Linux for it's native grsec
implementation. I'm experimenting with using it in virtual network labs and it
has worked pretty awesome so far.

------
oldpond
I loved crunchbang. The installer was great. It got from zero to everything
you needed for a development box in 15 minutes. Thanks for all your work!

------
undersuit
I run Debian, but the Crunchbang Forums have been a great place for me to
learn. I'll find tips, pearls of knowledge passed down from the masters, and
even whole config files for programs that barely get represented in the normal
linux distros.

Crunchbang served as repository of knowledge for a minimal desktop Linux and
hopefully the community keeps the forums active.

------
spiralpolitik
Sad news. CrunchBang was a great little distribution. A couple of rough edges,
but it was a refreshing change from Ubuntu or Debian.

------
nadams
Disclaimer: I've heard lots of great things about #!. However, I have never
had the chance to try it myself.

I kind of figured distributing the distro over torrent only was a bad idea.
For the kids sitting at home - torrenting isn't a bad thing
(generally...usually). However, when you are sitting at work and they are
monitoring traffic - downloading a torrent is a quick way to summon the
overlords (even if you were in a technical position like I was - there are
some things that they will look the other way, such as downloading the NT
password reset disk, but downloading a torrent would not be one of them). And
no, I wasn't about to "sneak" in a burned copy of #!.

In today's day and age of CDNs and cloud storage I found it highly suspect
that they couldn't find someone to mirror it (even uploading to sourceforge).
I'm not claiming there was anything wrong with #! but offering a torrent only
download makes me cautious.

~~~
eloisant
I don't know, whenever I need to download a distro like Ubuntu I do it via
torrent. For some reason it's way faster than downloading from the CDN.

~~~
nadams
CDNs/Mirrors always downloaded fast for me (<5 minutes). It could be the auto
selection not working well for you - which you should be able to overwrite.

------
kancer
I've been running Crunchbang for two years. It is the only distro that had
working media buttons, multi touch trackpad, close lid -> sleep working out of
the box on my T420. Not sure if any of this changed but all the other distros
I tried required me to write config files and bash scripts. Sad to see it go.

------
zeroviscosity
All good things must come to an end. I've been a dedicated #! user for years.
I have it on my work desktop, my home desktop, my Macbook Pro, my Macbook Air
and my home media server. In other words, I'm a bit obsessed with it. I really
appreciate all that @corenominal has done and wish him all the best.

------
morganvachon
Sad, sad news. It's the only Debian based distro that I've found to be nearly
perfect out of the box for my workflow. I had a feeling this was coming for a
while (as most #! users probably did), and I've mulled over trying to emulate
its interface and approach using another major distro (Slackware) as the base.
But the two, Debian and Slackware, are just so different that it's beyond my
ability to commit the amount of time needed to do it properly.

Given the impending systemd switch in Debian, I probably would have had to
give up using #! going forward anyway. Still, it kills me to see it possibly
disappearing one day soon. I hope Corenominal can pass the torch to the
community in a way that allows it to live on in some form.

~~~
jwjones
Slackbang, easy...

[http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com/p/project-slackbang.htm...](http://all-
things-linux.blogspot.com/p/project-slackbang.html)

~~~
morganvachon
I've looked at that before, and it's not really the same thing. ArchBang and
Crunchbang are two completely different projects, though they share a common
thread. Thanks for the reminder though, I'll check it out and see how it has
progressed.

------
aroch
Archbang is still under active development, thankfully

~~~
quakkels
Do you use it? How do you like it? (I visited the archbang.org site. After
about 5 minutes of browsing the wiki their server started throwing 500 errors.
I assume due to high traffic.)

[edit] It seems to be working again.

~~~
aroch
I do, I run it on my MBP (two SSDs, one running OSX one with ARchbang).

I've run it now for quite a while and like it. I used to run vanilla Arch, and
as is bound to happen with any Arch based distro there are the occasional
breaking change. The archbang maintainers have dealt with them pretty well and
they give advanced warning where possible.

Archbang and Crunchbang are fairly similar in feel -- they use essentially the
same visual setup.

------
stolio
That's a bummer. I used to run Debian with OpenBox so I'd often end up sifting
through the old CrunchBang forum threads to fix stuff. Just an amazingly nice
and supportive community.

Running Debian/OpenBox was pretty cool. I'd imagine if you keep your config
files, especially rc.xml and the startup scripts, you could home-roll
something quite similar to #!. Although running OpenBox by yourself can be a
massive time-suck.

------
talles
Noooo, #! is one of my favorite distros. Used for quite a while in the past.

I stopped using when they switched the base system from Ubuntu to Debian (I
know, shame on me) :(

~~~
theandrewbailey
Don't beat yourself up. I think I stopped using around the Debian transition
also.

I remember using #! in VirtualBox as a development environment on a otherwise
Windows machine. After #!, I think I used Mint, and now Xubuntu.

------
seldonPlan
The link seems to be dead for me. What was the reason #! is ending? I really
enjoy this distro. Very sad to see it gone.

~~~
raphman_
_" I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy
decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go
of something you love.

When I first started working on CrunchBang, the Linux landscape was a very
different place and whilst I honestly didn’t know if there was any value to
it, I knew there was a place for CrunchBang on my own systems. [...]
CrunchBang filled a gap and that was nifty.

So, what’s changed?

For anyone who has been involved with Linux for the past ten years or so, I’m
sure they’ll agree that things have moved on. Whilst some things have stayed
exactly the same, others have changed beyond all recognition. It’s called
progress, and for the most part, progress is a good thing. That said, when
progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is
something that I need to leave behind. I’m leaving it behind because I
honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on
to it for sentimental reasons, I don’t believe that would be in the best
interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian."_

------
logn
The web site is slow under the load.

[https://archive.today/QhASD](https://archive.today/QhASD)

------
carlivar
I appreciate the philosophy of CrunchBang, but for my recently-built Linux
desktop PC I tried it out. Spent two days trying to get sound to work
correctly. Really brought me back to my struggles with Linux 10+ years ago.
Gave up and went with a mainstream distro where sound Just Worked.

~~~
BFay
Sound is such an annoying thing to troubleshoot on linux. I'm pretty happy
with the way Pulseaudio handles on the mainstream distros, but sometimes I do
more intensive audio work where I need to use Jack and the configuration can
get confusing.

We can send pulse through jack now and everything works out pretty well, but
setting this up seems like a slightly different process on every distro.

------
thatsjustcrazy
A sad day indeed. Brings me back to my days of obsessively sampling every
flavor of Linux out there.

------
danneu
Crunchbang is the only lightweight distro that completely worked on my 2008
10" Atom netbook. I used that thing for three years when I was a student.

It's my favorite distro, I'm thankful for it, and it's sad to see it come to
an end.

------
rak
At one point this was my favorite distro and my favorite irc channel to hang
out in. It showed me a lot about the possibilities of configuring a minimal
system.

Sad to see it go. Thanks for everything.

------
chanux
I used crunchbang once and loved it! Also I've picked up a lot form the forum.
Even though I had to be with ubuntu for reasosns, it's really sad to see #!
go.

------
vohof
CrunchBang was my togo distro as well. Everything's nicely setup. But when I
tried ArchLinux, I never looked back. CrunchBang has a very awesome community!

------
johntaitorg
Nooooo Crunchbang is perfect

------
forlorn
So, no other maintainers are willing to continue working on it?

~~~
smellf
The news was announced about 12 hours ago, so it's still early times, but I
imagine someone will step up or some other project will fill the gap.

I wonder if it would be possible to get a package into Debian's repos that
essentially turns a system into Crunchbang? Of course the name would have to
change, as that belongs to the former lead dev. Something like "shebang-
desktop"?

------
william20111
very sad to see this happen. Hopefully somebody takes over and guides the
project from here. They have made a great distro with the openbox wm.

------
emehrkay
Funny how branding works. Having never heard of, or forgotten about,
CrunchBang, for a split second I thought "Tech Crunch has a linux bistro? Must
be for that tablet that they made a few years ago." I recently encountered
this with Plan B Burgers in DC.

------
pearjuice
I never really got the popularity of CrunchBang it was basically a Debian
minimal with a "sudo apt-get install openbox tint2 conky" post-install script.

~~~
wooger
Not just that, but useable, well thought out configuration, a few custom
packages, whatever kernel is required to make a bunch more hardware work OOTB
and some taste applied, something that's sorely lacking in many linux distros.

