

Review: CrunchBang – Linux 11 "Waldorf" - rohshall
http://dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.sg/2013/05/review-crunchbang-linux-11-waldorf.html

======
babarock
I've been using #! exclusively on my home laptops for over 2 years now. Here's
what I like about it:

\- It's a minimal Debian. I have a good idea of the installed packages on my
system. Very few surprises.

\- Openbox is great. I cannot ever imagine myself going back to
GNOME/KDE/Unity/XFCE and all these "desktop environments".

\- #! looks great. The theme, the icons, the fonts, ... Very good work is made
for this. A special effort has been put on proper and pretty compositing.

\- cb-welcome script is run the first time you login a non-liveCD session. It
lets you configure your install nicely.

What I dislike:

There's only one thing I dislike about this distribution. It includes some
questionable apps by default (like GIMP or Abiword). This wouldn't be a
problem, except that ever since the latest 2 releases, the size of the iso has
risen above 700MB and won't fit on a CD anymore.

Who should try it:

Everybody can try it, but you should know what you're stepping into. I
recommend it strongly for people who enjoy minimalism and control over shiny
magic. As far as skill level go, there's nothing inherently difficult about
using #!, but I think it will be more appealing to people already familiar
with Debian.

My rule of thumb is that if you know how to manage your sources.list file (and
you understand the difference between running Sid or Stable+backports) then
you're good to go.

Shameless plug: I have written a more extensive review of the first build of
#! 11. You can find it here: [http://www.tech-thoughts-blog.com/2012/05/first-
builds-of-ne...](http://www.tech-thoughts-blog.com/2012/05/first-builds-of-
new-crunchbang-waldorf.html) Keep in mind that the distro has had one year +
to mature since.

~~~
primitur
Whats Audio support like? I've been running Ubuntu-Studio with JACK for years,
and have a very much 'entrenched' setup consisting of multiple (20+) channels
of Firewire Audio in my studio environment - it works great, and is a real
power DAW. (I never, ever use Pulseaudio .. but do have an alsa-jack 'channel
bridge' so that I can have Alsa compatability)

But I'd love to know that JACK is a first-class citizen on #!. Is it?

Also, I have a small stack of extremely old Panasonic Toughbook CF-25's that
I've been trying to find a distro for, as I believe they're still quite
useful, albeit ancient.. is it feasible to run it with only 128meg of RAM, yet
moderate-sized hard drive, and Pentium-133 style CPU, you think?

~~~
keithpeter
_"is it feasible to run it with only 128meg of RAM, yet moderate-sized hard
drive, and Pentium-133 style CPU, you think?"_

AntiX Linux might be better for that class of machine. The developers seem to
run AntiX on low spec machines. AntiX uses scripts & ncurses UIs for a lot of
functions.

~~~
primitur
Thanks for the great tip! I'll be dusting a toughbook off and having a little
distro party .. looks like antiX is perfect for my needs! :) EDIT: In case its
of interest, if I can get what I need onboard to build and run LOAD81 (see
<http://github.com/antirez/load81>) then I'll be in heaven .. ancient hardware
re-tasked with a Lua front-end! Fabulous new old toy!

------
xSwag
I run crunchbang on a 6 year old Core 2 Duo desktop machine and it runs really
well.

Why you should try it:

    
    
        - noob friendly, you don't have to compile from source or
          read the manual for hours to see what flags
          you need (compared to gentoo or arch)
        - Lightweight
        - Perfect for web browsing, irc etc
        - Beautiful font rendering (much better than windows)
        - Extremely friendly and helpful community forums
        - Beautiful non-bloated minimal UI, you don't have to spend hours customizing
        - Boots in around 6-7 seconds on my machine

~~~
rohshall
great overview of crunchbang's advantages. One minor correction, Arch is a
binary distribution and you need to compile from source only if the package is
not in the official arch repository.

~~~
electronvolt
But you do need to read the manuals to know which flags to use/need, and
moreso than #!: it's the difference between knowing apt-get and knowing the
command line at a much deeper level.

(I now use arch almost exclusively, but used #! until I switched. The rolling
release system is the main reason I did.)

~~~
rohshall
I am curious where you used flags to compile packages in Arch. You need to
read manuals, for sure. But, installing unofficial packages from AUR is a
breeze - just unzip and then makepkg -si.

------
p4bl0
What is the difference between CrunchBang and a standard Debian installation
with Openbox as the window manager and no desktop environment (which has been
my exact my setup for more than 5 years now) ?

From what I see CrunchBang is even less lightweight than my Debian + Openbox
setup: for instance it comes with a graphical file manager (I see Thunar on
the screenshots) and a lot of other software (graphical IDE, VLC…) that I
might never need and would prefer to install on demand when I need them if
that ever happens.

~~~
brusch
I think there is no advantage over what you're doing. It is just easier
accessible for people new to Openbox

~~~
p4bl0
Okay. That's a great thing, because Openbox is really awesome (no pun intended
^^).

------
shardling
About a year and a half ago I tried out about a dozen "light" linux distros on
a really crappy old Compaq my dad had picked up for a couple bucks. I think it
had 128 MB of RAM. (Maybe 256?)

Crunchbang was one of only two distros that ran well, and the other one
(puppy) was hideously ugly. If you need a graphical linux desktop on a machine
where memory is limited, you should give Crunchbang a try.

(As an aside, there was one "lightweight" distro that used the Ubuntu
installer, which had a higher memory requirement than the distro itself. I
suggested that maybe this be mentioned on the requirements page, but the
developer said he didn't see the point. >.<)

------
__chrismc
I installed CrunchBang on my aging Core 2 Duo desktop (2.3GHz, 4GB RAM).
Whenever I played about with Linux before, I installed Arch, but this time I
couldn't be bothered with the initial setup.

So far, I love it. Enough that I'm seriously considering making it a full-time
switch. I've made a few tweaks (compiled a newer kernel, installed systemd)
and I've now got an old PC that boots in just a few seconds and is more than
responsive enough for my day-to-day use. I didn't _have_ to do those tweaks
though, as everything worked right out of the box anyway.

------
n8wood
I got tired of wasting time tweaking Ubuntu to my liking; I got tired of
Ubuntu performance seemingly getting worse with each release.

I gave #! a try last week and have since installed it on all three of my
workstations (home and office). Of all the distros I've tried, this one comes
closest to what I'm looking for out of the box. Openbox, tint2, along with
kupfer (Quicksilver-like keyboard launcher) are efficient, beautiful, and
powerful.

------
animesh
Crunchbang is fun and very usable at the very same time, and also comes with
great community out of the box.

If you fall into the following categories of users, then just go for
CrunchBang:

    
    
      You want a ready to use Linux Laptop.  
      You want to be a happy customer (user).  
      You want great help at your disposal.  
      You want a minimal, but functional distro.  
      All of the above.
    

Shameless plug to my blog post detailing my experiences of using Crunchbang
for a year as my main OS: [http://log.animeshb.in/2013/02/a-crunchbang-
experience-year-...](http://log.animeshb.in/2013/02/a-crunchbang-experience-
year-later.html)

------
orik
CrunchBang is abbreviated to #!* not just #.

It's my favourite linux distro. That and Arch for my ARM Devices. The forums
and IRC are very helpful also; I highly recommend #! for anyone who wants to
give linux a try.

------
hermanhermitage
I tried a number of distros recently with an eye to choosing one that works
well on a range of low end hardware - with a focus on software development.

#! was my final pick by a country mile because (personal taste of course): \-
beautiful fonts out of the box \- clutter free snappy desktop/environment \-
tasteful defaults

Essentially a distro where there is no need for me to adjust much as the
defaults match my tastes.

------
nicholassmith
I've used #! for a few years on and off, mostly as they had it nailed down
tight for using on the Acer Aspire One in ye olden netbook days. It's a nice
community, dedicated to keeping things light and lean, it's pretty
straightforward as well and you don't have to spend much time configuring it.
It's well worth trying in a VM and seeing if it works well for you.

------
pfortuny
#! has been the only Linux distribution that has worked "out of the box" on my
(yes, OLD) Parallels version on my (older) MBPro. Tried Fedora, Ubuntu &
probably another one until fund this little gem.

Kudos to the maintainers.

------
angersock
Running #! myself right now, having tried various other distros over the
years. It's my main desktop environment for when I'm not gaming, being very
fast and sane.

The main advantage it has over Debian, Mint, or (shudder) Ubuntu is that it is
a no-bullshit setup of Debian with all of the normal tweaks I'd eventually add
myself. It _already starts_ with a solid setup of Openbox, and competently
brings up the non-free software I'd be using anyways right at install time via
a friendly little script.

And, unlike Ubuntu or Mint, it seems to be a fairly small shim over stock
Debian--which makes getting things to work a hell of a lot easier.

Also, for anybody running it (or other .deb compatible distros), check this
out:

<http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/>

It's a nicely trimmed-up version of Wine with Silverlight that generally does
the right thing and lets you _watch Netflix from your Linux_.

~~~
xSwag
Relevant (Netflix): [http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/04/netflix-plans-to-ditch-
silv...](http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/04/netflix-plans-to-ditch-silverlight-
for-html5/)

------
kroger
I always pronounce #! as 'shebang':

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)>

~~~
__chrismc
So did I until I went to Uni. The "Crusty Old Unix Guy" who taught some of the
smaller course modules would knock off a mark if you didn't refer to it as
'hashbang'.

------
saosebastiao
I ran crunchbang on an old Atom-processor netbook with a gig of RAM from 2009.
It is amazing how fast it was compared to the stock XP.

------
jongibbins
CrunchBang is great and can be summed up in a few words: Tidy, clean, works.

End of. :)

------
Rovanion
Isn't it "#!"?

~~~
p4bl0
Yes, but I guess the '!' was automatically removed by HN (I know it does that
at least when the '!' is at the end of the link title).

