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Comment by slfnflctd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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 ?

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.

You don't need a special, weird distro to run openbox, just use Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora unless you're a masochist.

In the case of Lubuntu, LXDE use the openbox window manager anyway, so even without touching apt-get you can logout, choose a pure openbox session and login if you want, though it takes some configuration to be useable. LXDE seems fine and plenty light enought for me though.

> You don't need a special, weird distro to run openbox

I'm aware of this.

> it takes some configuration to be useable

Therein lies the problem. Even Crunchbang's default config is not exactly what I want, but I can go from vanilla #! to :) much faster than from vanilla Debian. I've built up a whole desktop with Debian and openbox before and I learned a lot, but it wasn't too pretty and it took a lot of work. Crunchbang isn't that weird at all, they hardly even package anything but a few skins to make it all look nice, and a few scripts to smooth out some rough spots in Debian. Aside from that, all #! provides for you is time-saving preconfig. I'm not one of those unixporn guys who wants to tweak and tweak their desktop all the time, if it's done well for me I'll use that, and #! is done well.

Lubuntu has been a good replacement for #! for me. It works out of the box on most reasonable hardware, has minimal requirements, good default applications, and a familiar layout. I think it's "easy for noobs on basic tasks", but I'm not that new anymore, so I'm not sure. I use it on old machines as an up-to-date environment that's light enough for them to run. If it weren't for Lubuntu, I wouldn't have a usable computer in my house.

I had my parent's desktop running Linux Mint for a while, but now I have them on the latest Xubuntu LTS. No one's had Big problems, even with a HP printer/scanner.

If you like the Crunchbang aesthetic but don't mind trying something non-Debian there's Archbang. Also GhostBSD, which is FreeBSD with an option to install OpenBox.

FreeBSD is FreeBSD with an option to install openbox ;) No need for less popular forks of the whole OS. Just $ sudo pkg install openbox.

Peppermint is working pretty good for me these days.

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