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Comment by xSwag | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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.

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?

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