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.
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'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.
I had a feeling this was coming, based on the fact Corenominal is mostly running Jessie with Gnome in some of his recent posts, and the lack of development around the Jessie based version.
I think Corenominal is a stand-up guy in general, and great for the GNU/Linux community. I think he is also leaving the project at the right time, before he has to face the demons of init that are in Jessie, and now that vanilla debian with xfce or lxde is much closer to the user-friendly and complete desktop that #! was so great for.
All that positive stuff said, this kinda sucks. I was really looking forward to the next version. I agree with many others that it isn't pointless yet, there still isn't anything quite as polished while still being super lightweight.
I have great respect for anyone who undergoes a big project. So I am sad that this project is coming to an end, and I hope his future endeavors go well.
But.
From my perspective as someone who keeps going back to Linux and trying to use it every 18 months or so, the #1 problem today is that there are WAY too many distros -- and as a result, all of them are broken. What really needs to happen is for the Linux community to put a great deal of elbow grease into a small number of distros.
Because I only try Linux every year or two (and give up on it every time), I see isolated snapshots of how usable the OS is, and from my perspective, it's gotten less stable and less usable over the past 5 years. (Six months ago I had to try 4 different distros before one would even install correctly on one of my two test laptops, for example).
In terms of mainstream distros that are actively trying to appeal to end-users (not counting fringe research projects), how many is enough to provide good variety? I am thinking 3-5 maybe?
Does anyone think that is an efficient way to produce quality results?
Edit: It's also worth keeping in mind that the Wikipedia list is sort of the minimal list of versions. For example, if you go to the Linux Mint homepage, you get 4 different versions to choose from: http://www.linuxmint.com/
This is sad. I am using CB on my Notebooks and i love it. It's preconfigured setup was the perfect sweet spot between a Debian-minimal install and the somewhat "bloated" big distros out there.
Not bloat, configuration. That is, I suspect the parent comment is not suggesting that these Debian installations are bloated, but that their default configuration leaves much to be desired.
In my own use, I found Crunchbang to have the UX polish of a large distro with the overhead of a minimal distro. An excellent combination that will be greatly missed.
The default dark gray theme that it had was refreshing back in the day, just as everyone was falling over themselves with bright colors and transparency.
What exactly are you missing? I found the desktop-task-packages on Debian testing quite usable without any configuration.
If you haven't tried them for a year or two or if you just tested the stable release, I can recommend to take a fresh look at testing/the upcoming Jessie release. It has become much more polished over the last year or two.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm a big fan of Openbox when it's set up properly. Before I discovered Crunchbang, I would burn many hours getting Openbox to the way I liked it, installing certain packages and tweaking settings until I was exhausted from the effort. But in the end, I had a setup that got out of my way and let me focus on work.
When I discovered Crunchbang, I was blown away. about 90% of what I set up for myself was already done here, with a slightly different theme and a few different default apps of course. But I found that with just an hour or so of tweaking I could get Crunchbang to the same state I would spend a weekend trying to get to on another distro. The differences between Crunchbang defaults and my own were usually improvements, and I decided to switch to better apps after giving them a go in Crunchbang (from Gedit to Geany for editing for example).
I used CrunchBang for quite a while, and it's sad to see it go, but I completely understand why the maintainer doesn't want to do it anymore, even though I disagree with his statement that CrunchBang no longer has value.
Oh man. CrunchBang is my go-to distro when I need something lightweight that just works out of the box. The default install is a great, well-featured system.
Posting from a Crunchbang desktop - not the best thing to be the first thing to read as I get up in the morning.
I expect I'll be able to do some apt-repo magic and switch over to Debian when the next stable release comes out, but I hope there's not too much breakage when I do.
Your system will probably accumulate small breakage here and there over time, dependency hell, etc. I'd recommend to schedule a few hours for a proper install of Debian, to me it sounds like a much more pleasant approach. Source: hanging out in the Debian IRC channel and seeing desperate people who tried to switch repos.
As others have commented, breakage is to be expected.
I'm sure someone will share an unofficial crunchbang setup script (based on a minimal debian install) once Jessie becomes stable. Happened in the past already, works very well.
Crunchbang rocks, using it since 2009 on all my machines. Don't feel like moving to something else.
Yeah, I've done it, and it is harsh. Easier to do a clean Jesse install and manually set things up. Basically you would want the dotfiles from /etc/skel on a crunchbang install, and then several of the custom scripts (I think from /usr/bin) like conky-wonky, cb-printers, etc. A bunch start with cb-.
I've just rebuilt my #! laptop last week. I can't remember what I did to break it now, but I did. Anyway, I installed vanilla #! Waldorf, updated sources to Jessie, commented out Waldorf sources and dist-upgraded.
No really major dramas. Run cb-printers before the upgrade to Jessie. Icons do screw up a bit, but easily fixed by installing some similar Gnome 3 icon themes. I'm using cb-waldorf-xoraxiom and "Grey-Icons" at the moment. Everything else seems to work fine.
I really like the #! Openbox experience and have yet to find anything quite like it. I did try Archbang during this re-build process, but wasn't convinced on first viewing. I know I could just install Debian and Openbox myself, but then have to spend a lot of extra time setting up menus, conky etc.
I'll miss #!, as I've really enjoyed it over the last three years. I've no reason to install anything else right now, but in six months I suppose I'll go elsewhere.
I dist-upgraded to Jessie from my working Waldorf system (using now). It was a little faffy, but not too bad.
One problem I've got is black internal borders on some of my menus (e.g. network-manager panel menu), but it doesn't affect me much and I really can't be bothered to read the docs to sort it out. Any ideas?
This was the good thing about Crunchbang: a lightweight debian install that looked good and needed hardly any configuration to work well.
Crunchbang is my most favorite distribution. For the last 2 years I found it perfect for my needs, especially on slightly older machines. Originally I came from SuSe, moved on to Red Hat and Fedora, then played with Gentoo for a while. Ubuntu is great, but with each version the out-of-the-box experience became less and less desirable. Crunchbang (which I discovered on HN, btw) was minimalist (but not painfully so) and shared Ubuntu's robustness.
Apart from things like:
* WiFi on my x230 in Wheezy doesn't work ootb, it does in Crunchbang.
* Install debian and openbox and you get a barely configured desktop without a panel, with no power management, no network applet, no decent fonts etc.
It takes a bunch of work to get Debian up to the level of Crunchbang, enough to put off novice users.
I haven't used crunchbang before, but having tried XFCE and MATE on Debian Jessie recently I have found MATE to provide a better experience.
The only bug I've encountered is that taskbar icons don't work for Qt5 applications.
AFAIK he made no money whatsoever out of it. If it's not necessary for him any more, and doesn't make him any value, it's hardly difficult to understand he doesn't want to continue working on it.
To me #! was quite good for my needs, I'm quite sad to see it go. As someone who's not quite adept at using Linux, it was configured enough that I wasn't lost following instructions.
I never used CrunchBang, but heard quite a bit about it, and like an big open source user/supporter, I'm sorry to see CrunchBang go.
But honest question: with the rise of Ubuntu, Debian and a few other "alpha" Linux versions, does it make sense to put in effort and keep an alternative Linux version running? I've always toyed with making my own Ubuntu variant with custom window manager, but never got around to it.
Building on top of Debian or Ubuntu is challenging. Debian is very strict about non-free packages, and normally tries to avoid them, and will even gut non-free binaries from their code. This is an issue when making a distro. If you stick purely with Debian you'll get the Linux-Libre kernel, not the proper kernel. Which really hurts a lot of hardware support, or performance in some scenarios.
Ubuntu has a lot of custom packages baked in. These can be stripped but they'll make building on top of the platform difficult. Also the init system differences are challenging + all the weird X stuff they do with Unity.
Generally if you want to roll your own distro start with a solid foundation of Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch. Something that isn't picky about its packages, and has less of a moral or business agenda.
First, you don't have to live with Unity if you don't like it - you can choose to start from any of the variants: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu... but you could just use the stripped down ubuntu-server distro, maybe change the default kernel and add a DE/whatever on top of that.
Another option would be oem-config, which lets you customise repositories & packages, and end up with an installed system which can then be remastered (by means of rsyncing or by copying whole partitions) before the final user customisation.
Ubuntu builder was a nice project too, it's a pity it was abandoned. Someone should definitely resurrect it!
Edit: I re-read your comment and understand you're not talking about packages, but rather about actual package contents, paths, init system and the likes. Yes, Ubuntu (and to a lesser degree Debian) has its own ways; it makes no sense to try to undo their customisations - unless you have the power to write your own.
> But honest question: with the rise of Ubuntu, Debian and a few other "alpha" Linux versions, does it make sense to put in effort and keep an alternative Linux version running?
Oh yes, it definitely makes sense. Because: bloat.
It started as an easy to use but minimal Linux for the eeePC 701 (4 GB soldered SSD; 512(?)mB RAM).
When I used it it didn't quite fit that - it had the help files for Open Office because they were a dependency for something else (not Open Office) which was a bit weird.
If someone tried the same thing now I guess they'd use Arch.
> I've always toyed with making my own Ubuntu variant with custom window manager, but never got around to it.
Why? Why not just use Arch? Or, if you want the hard work, Linux from Scratch?
There are quite a few Linux distributions that are taking completely different aproaches to certain subsets of the system. I, for one, really like NixOS for example.
It does make sense to keep these projects around, since they are sometimes so radically different that a completely separate branch is required to make innovation happen. When a proof of concept gains traction, other distributions can learn from it and perhaps integrate parts into their own ecosystems.
A real waste. So I'll go ahead with my eulogy. #! to me was more than an operating system or Debian with slick OpenBox configs. #! was the community, the aesthetics. It represented a bold idea and executed it flawlessly. I really hope the community can take on the mantle, and trudge on. I disagree that #! has no more value. On the contrary, I think its value was already starting to increase in the recent years.
I really liked CrunchBang, especially the setup scripts, which I think shouldn't be too hard to port over to a debian minimal install anyway.
For those of you looking for similar alternatives, ArchBang is pretty awesome, but I have been increasingly interested in Alpine Linux for it's native grsec implementation. I'm experimenting with using it in virtual network labs and it has worked pretty awesome so far.
I run Debian, but the Crunchbang Forums have been a great place for me to learn. I'll find tips, pearls of knowledge passed down from the masters, and even whole config files for programs that barely get represented in the normal linux distros.
Crunchbang served as repository of knowledge for a minimal desktop Linux and hopefully the community keeps the forums active.
Disclaimer: I've heard lots of great things about #!. However, I have never had the chance to try it myself.
I kind of figured distributing the distro over torrent only was a bad idea. For the kids sitting at home - torrenting isn't a bad thing (generally...usually). However, when you are sitting at work and they are monitoring traffic - downloading a torrent is a quick way to summon the overlords (even if you were in a technical position like I was - there are some things that they will look the other way, such as downloading the NT password reset disk, but downloading a torrent would not be one of them). And no, I wasn't about to "sneak" in a burned copy of #!.
In today's day and age of CDNs and cloud storage I found it highly suspect that they couldn't find someone to mirror it (even uploading to sourceforge). I'm not claiming there was anything wrong with #! but offering a torrent only download makes me cautious.
CDNs/Mirrors always downloaded fast for me (<5 minutes). It could be the auto selection not working well for you - which you should be able to overwrite.
They probably use torrents because they're easy and free. There's nothing shady about it, the distro just has ~1 maintainer and there's too much demand for #! for regular hosting to be viable.
In the real world, using Bittorrent protocol is not wrong. I feel bad for you if you work in a place where the powers that be are fine with you downloading a distro via HTTP or FTP but not via Bittorrent.
> there's too much demand for #! for regular hosting to be viable
That is exactly why sourceforge and other (free) mirror services were created...
In fact there are Linux ISO installers being hosted on sourceforge right now.
> I feel bad for you if you work in a place where the powers that be are fine with you downloading a distro via HTTP or FTP but not via Bittorrent.
That is a loaded comment - and I'm not really sure if you are trolling but...
The company did have public mirrors for the popular distros so that wasn't an issue. FTP access was restricted.
However, I would be VERY surprised if bittorrent is allowed any serious company. I worked at a place where new management wanted to open up everything - with strong recommendation from the netadmins to not do that. The netadmins were ignored, forced to open up everything and people started bittorrenting copyrighted material and got letters from MPAA/RIAA (which was rather funny because everything was logged on the firewall so you could see who was doing it...).
I won't argue that bittorrent can be used for good things, however, due to the negative stigma and general stupidity of people most sane places would block it. Ignoring the fact that it's a bandwidth suck...
I guess it depends on the work place. I work at an enterprise (>1000) sized corporation and I've torrented stuff without hearing about it. We also use bittorrent internally to help bring servers online.
I've been running Crunchbang for two years. It is the only distro that had working media buttons, multi touch trackpad, close lid -> sleep working out of the box on my T420. Not sure if any of this changed but all the other distros I tried required me to write config files and bash scripts. Sad to see it go.
All good things must come to an end. I've been a dedicated #! user for years. I have it on my work desktop, my home desktop, my Macbook Pro, my Macbook Air and my home media server. In other words, I'm a bit obsessed with it. I really appreciate all that @corenominal has done and wish him all the best.
Sad, sad news. It's the only Debian based distro that I've found to be nearly perfect out of the box for my workflow. I had a feeling this was coming for a while (as most #! users probably did), and I've mulled over trying to emulate its interface and approach using another major distro (Slackware) as the base. But the two, Debian and Slackware, are just so different that it's beyond my ability to commit the amount of time needed to do it properly.
Given the impending systemd switch in Debian, I probably would have had to give up using #! going forward anyway. Still, it kills me to see it possibly disappearing one day soon. I hope Corenominal can pass the torch to the community in a way that allows it to live on in some form.
I've looked at that before, and it's not really the same thing. ArchBang and Crunchbang are two completely different projects, though they share a common thread. Thanks for the reminder though, I'll check it out and see how it has progressed.
Do you use it? How do you like it? (I visited the archbang.org site. After about 5 minutes of browsing the wiki their server started throwing 500 errors. I assume due to high traffic.)
I do, I run it on my MBP (two SSDs, one running OSX one with ARchbang).
I've run it now for quite a while and like it. I used to run vanilla Arch, and as is bound to happen with any Arch based distro there are the occasional breaking change. The archbang maintainers have dealt with them pretty well and they give advanced warning where possible.
Archbang and Crunchbang are fairly similar in feel -- they use essentially the same visual setup.
That's a bummer. I used to run Debian with OpenBox so I'd often end up sifting through the old CrunchBang forum threads to fix stuff. Just an amazingly nice and supportive community.
Running Debian/OpenBox was pretty cool. I'd imagine if you keep your config files, especially rc.xml and the startup scripts, you could home-roll something quite similar to #!. Although running OpenBox by yourself can be a massive time-suck.
"I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I’ve been putting it off for months. It’s hard to let go of something you love.
When I first started working on CrunchBang, the Linux landscape was a very different place and whilst I honestly didn’t know if there was any value to it, I knew there was a place for CrunchBang on my own systems. [...] CrunchBang filled a gap and that was nifty.
So, what’s changed?
For anyone who has been involved with Linux for the past ten years or so, I’m sure they’ll agree that things have moved on. Whilst some things have stayed exactly the same, others have changed beyond all recognition. It’s called progress, and for the most part, progress is a good thing. That said, when progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is something that I need to leave behind. I’m leaving it behind because I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, I don’t believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian."
I appreciate the philosophy of CrunchBang, but for my recently-built Linux desktop PC I tried it out. Spent two days trying to get sound to work correctly. Really brought me back to my struggles with Linux 10+ years ago. Gave up and went with a mainstream distro where sound Just Worked.
Sound is such an annoying thing to troubleshoot on linux. I'm pretty happy with the way Pulseaudio handles on the mainstream distros, but sometimes I do more intensive audio work where I need to use Jack and the configuration can get confusing.
We can send pulse through jack now and everything works out pretty well, but setting this up seems like a slightly different process on every distro.
At one point this was my favorite distro and my favorite irc channel to hang out in. It showed me a lot about the possibilities of configuring a minimal system.
I used crunchbang once and loved it! Also I've picked up a lot form the forum. Even though I had to be with ubuntu for reasosns, it's really sad to see #! go.
CrunchBang was my togo distro as well. Everything's nicely setup. But when I tried ArchLinux, I never looked back. CrunchBang has a very awesome community!
The news was announced about 12 hours ago, so it's still early times, but I imagine someone will step up or some other project will fill the gap.
I wonder if it would be possible to get a package into Debian's repos that essentially turns a system into Crunchbang? Of course the name would have to change, as that belongs to the former lead dev. Something like "shebang-desktop"?
Funny how branding works. Having never heard of, or forgotten about, CrunchBang, for a split second I thought "Tech Crunch has a linux bistro? Must be for that tablet that they made a few years ago." I recently encountered this with Plan B Burgers in DC.
I never really got the popularity of CrunchBang it was basically a Debian minimal with a "sudo apt-get install openbox tint2 conky" post-install script.
Not just that, but useable, well thought out configuration, a few custom packages, whatever kernel is required to make a bunch more hardware work OOTB and some taste applied, something that's sorely lacking in many linux distros.
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.