Review: CrunchBang – Linux 11 "Waldorf" | Hacker News Reader

Review: CrunchBang – Linux 11 "Waldorf"

dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.sg

59 pointsrohshall34 comments

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... Keep in mind that the distro has had one year + to mature since.

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?

#! is just Debian with a small number of additional or modified packages.

"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.

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!

I thought cb-welcome was a very nice touch when I'd finished the install. It would be nice if more distros did something similar to get a new user setup with some default packages related to their needs.

First thing I did when cb-welcome finished was uninstall Abiword, Gnumeric, and Iceweasel (replaced with Chrome + Google Docs).

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

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.

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.)

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.

> Beautiful non-bloated minimal UI, you don't have to spend hours customizing

I would add (as a #! fan who also runs it on an older Core 2 Duo) that the default UI is also extremely user-friendly to tweak out of the box if you do want to customize it. Conky makes for some really cool desktop displays, and Openbox is very easily configurable (see also the reviewer's mention of Tint2). Though I suppose those are aspects of Conky and Openbox specifically, they exemplify the feel of using Crunchbang as a whole.

I'd like to also reiterate that their forums are fantastic, especially for getting some easy cut-paste config changes.

As someone who used it as my second Linux distro (after Ubuntu iirc) after knowing only Windows, it made the transition very easy and fun.

I'll add

    - Debian-based so very reliable and stable
    - Good base for other WM like i3

The only thing I miss, coming from Gnome 2, is no drag and drop to desktop.

I don't understand why you would install i3 on #!. Having tried it, I found the only thing really distinguishing #! from vanilla Debian was a nicely configured Openbox environment. If you're not going to use Openbox, why not just start with a base Debian install?

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.

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

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

I like Crunchbang for political, not technical reasons. It doesn't matter to me if every package is vanilla Debian.

Crunchbang provides an opinionated set of defaults for what a composable, 'minimal' Linux desktop might look like. These days, I would build what I want from a Debian base install. But the reason why I would care to do so, is that distros like Crunchbang showed me that the composable approach worked so well. It makes new Linux users care about playing with their environments, which, for good or ill, is a venerable long-time Free Software user preoccupation.

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. >.<)

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

#! 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.

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.

Relevant (Netflix): http://www.webmonkey.com/2013/04/netflix-plans-to-ditch-silv...

I always pronounce #! as 'shebang':

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

I think octothorpe-bang, thanks to a mildly deranged CS professor back in the day.

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'.

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.

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

End of. :)

Isn't it "#!"?

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).

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