Crunchbang is not dead

I totally agree with you on this, and with Corenomical's idea that perhaps the need for the Crunchbang distro had run its course. I understand how people like the differnt GUI tweaks provided by certain distros and why people wanted to continue Crunchbang.

Continuing with Crunchbang just seems like a lot of wasted effort to me. The effort could be better spent working within the Debian project itself.

Not just fun, I don't always enjoy switching desktop environments. I've never used LXDE (I'm sure it's great) but I'd imagine switching to it is just like every other migration: it takes time before you're as productive with the new as you were with the old. And when I used it I really, really liked Openbox. You just have so much control over your environemnt.

That said I'm using XFCE at the moment because it "just works" and it's doubtful it will ever require any amount of time or energy. I chose it over Openbox/Crunchbang specifically because I wanted something I didn't have to think about.

Corenominal was somewhat wrong, however. For people like not-a-hacker, they tried and realized that all the customization that corenominal went through is more than they are willing to learn. It takes a LOT of time if you are a total end-user. Crunchbang has different types of users. No small portion of its users fall under "novice who wants an efficient, simple, but not Puppy Linux-puritanical distro."

Philip posted this [1] on his twitter account, so I would say so.

[1]: https://twitter.com/corenominal/status/566945562512347136

A debian-based linux distro that recently announced EOL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008776

Edit: It seems #!++ is a successor to #!, likely by a different maintainer. The OP mentions differences include a new theme and being based on debian jessie, whereas the last #! was based on wheezy.

From the github repo [0]:

#!++, A CrunchBang revival project.

Philip Newborough -- Corenominal -- has officially discontinued his efforts with the fast and light distro. While Philip believes that the project no longer serves the Linux space in the way he had originally intended, we believe that #! still has great potential and serves the Linux community as the perfect combination of elegance and efficiency.

So far, we're still only just finishing our 'Jessie-proofing' of the #! metapackage. While we intend to keep the distro very much the same as it has been over the years, some changes must be made to adapt to newer dependencies. Most notably, #!++ will have a new gtk theme (by xoraxiom) and a new default iconset using the faenza-crunchbang-icon-theme package from the #! repo.

A few more changes have been made under the hood, but stay tuned to our website at crunchbangplusplus.org for further updates. We look forward to bringing further fixes and enhancements to the project and documenting our methods and progress along the way.

Lastly, we'd like to thank Philip for all his hard work through the years, the legacy he's created, and the bar he's set for sleek high-performance distros.

[0]: https://github.com/computermouth/cbpp

Crunchbang, I'm realizing as I read your question was a one-man Linux distro project. The creator announced its end a week or few back.

Which somehow the various stories here are failing to elucidate.

Which gives me yet another opportunity to trot out one of my most popular HN comments of all time: "Please Forward to Marketing":

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...

Tell me what your product is. What it does, where it works, how it does it, what it requires. Is it a physical product (or is it shipped in one), an interactive application, a Web service, a programming language / tool? As a reader notes, don't make me use Wikipedia to figure out WTF your company does.

(Originally on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870)

In short: Crunchbang is/was Debian with a customized Openbox window manager instead of using Gnome/KDE/XFCE/etc. Crunchbang++ will probably continue the tradition.

The other replies above have failed to mention the single important bit: it's a Debian-based distro that uses _Openbox window manager_. See http://crunchbang.org/

There are way too many projects / websites where the 'about' page fails to state the blindingly obvious eg 'CrunchBang is a linux distribution'... which would save a lot of people a lot of time.

I don't use #! myself so I can't check, however you can find out how far away you are for yourself.

Check your sources list (either /etc/apt/sources.list or a set of files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d). Are you pulling in packages from Debian repositories already? If I remember correctly #! had its own repo which contained its WM configuration and whatnot but the rest was stock Debian. If so, there's probably no action required.

If not, I would wait and see what some more experienced #! users are doing with repository migration. The Crunchbang forums are probably a good starting point.

This came up in the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9008776) and it sounds like there's a good chance of dependency hell. (ctrl-f "dependency hell" to jump to the discussion)

It's the configurations that kept me on it for so long! Things just worked out of the box and it was amazing. I did a minimal install of arch + the necessary components once (and a netinst of Debian too) but it wasn't the same because my configurations never went deep enough. I always ended up getting frustrated having to do it all myself.

These days, I just use virtual machines when I need Linux, but I'd switch back to Crunchbang if multi monitor (one output from motherboard, one from gpu) worked better.

I've got to say, I'm a bit perplexed at distros being based on what are effectively different Debian package seeds / dselect files.

Nothing emotional about it, it's all about practicality for me. As I've said in a previous discussion, Crunchbang had in the default install what took me a couple of days to get with a bare base installation of Debian or Slackware. It was very, very close to what I already set up for myself, so I began to use Crunchbang and just spend an hour or so tweaking it to my liking, rather than days manually installing everything I used.

> Do a ubuntu minimal install and install openbox. In one fell swoop you've created something at least as good as crunchbang!

That's how I know you've never actually used Crunchbang; it's a lot more than "Debian with Openbox". Corenominal's scripts, layout, app choices, tweaks, and other modifications are more than enough for it to qualify as a standalone Debian-based distro, rather than "Debian with Openbox".

> I just expect a little more... productivity from hn.

Productivity is exactly why I like Crunchbang. Instead of spending those hours upon hours tweaking vanilla Debian, I can dive in and focus on real work, letting the OS fade into the background.

Didn't Crunchbang do that already? It's been a few years since I last used it, but I remember the sources.list pointing directly to Debian's repos and there was a special Crunchbang repo for small things. Maybe I'm remembering wrong though.

It's neither silly nor absurd. I can't get a crunchbang-like setup from Debian, and many who can don't care to spend the days it takes to do so (it's not just Debian with Openbox... go try it yourself?). Debian's stability and security is sought by many Linux users, but the default DE is a far cry from what certain users are looking for. That group of users ranges from novices to the skilled users who are developing crunchbang's successor at the moment.