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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 install
by babarock 13y ago
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-new-crunchbang-waldorf.html 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.
- primitur 13y agoWhats 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?
- sciurus 13y ago#! is just Debian with a small number of additional or modified packages.
- keithpeter 13y ago"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.
- primitur 13y agoThanks 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 http://github.com/antirez/load81) then I'll be in heaven .. ancient hardware re-tasked with a Lua front-end! Fabulous new old toy!
- __chrismc 13y agoI 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).