8 ms·

CrunchBang Linux: The end

203 points by _JamesA_ 12y ago

cms07 12y ago
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.
sauere 12y ago
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.
- phaer 12y ago
  What's so "bloated" about Debian with task-lxde-desktop, or task-xfce-desktop?
  - dewarrn1 12y ago
    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.
    - phaer 12y ago
      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.
      - morganvachon 12y ago
        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).
    - theandrewbailey 12y ago
      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.
samspenc 12y ago
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.
- DanBC 12y ago
  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?
- valarauca1 12y ago
  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.
  - willvarfar 12y ago
    CrunchBang was Debian-based, right?
    - theandrewbailey 12y ago
johntaitorg 12y ago
Nooooo Crunchbang is perfect
aroch 12y ago
Archbang is still under active development, thankfully
- quakkels 12y ago
  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.) [edit] It seems to be working again.
  - aroch 12y ago
    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.
- Socketubs 12y ago
  Is Archbang desktop configuration far from #! or very similar ?
  - aroch 12y ago
    They're pretty comparable, I like archbang a little better in terms of their defaults but that's only if I'm being picky.
slfnflctd 12y ago
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.
- cubano 12y ago
  Peppermint is working pretty good for me these days.
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  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.
- JasonFruit 12y ago
  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.
- smellf 12y ago
  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 http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wattos
perturbation 12y ago
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.
- therealidiot 12y ago
  I tried updating a #! (Wheezy) system to Debian Jessie a while back. Massive breakage.
  - laydros 12y ago
    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-.
    - phillc73 12y ago
      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.
      - aaren 12y ago
        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.
johnatwork 12y ago
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 will surely miss it.
ethagnawl 12y ago
I've been running #! for the last 1.5 years and it's been a pleasure to work with. Many thanks to @corenominal and the other contributors for their efforts over the last few years.
darkFunction 12y ago
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.
william20111 12y ago
very sad to see this happen. Hopefully somebody takes over and guides the project from here. They have made a great distro with the openbox wm.
spiralpolitik 12y ago
Sad news. CrunchBang was a great little distribution. A couple of rough edges, but it was a refreshing change from Ubuntu or Debian.
rak 12y ago
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. Sad to see it go. Thanks for everything.
seldonPlan 12y ago
The link seems to be dead for me. What was the reason #! is ending? I really enjoy this distro. Very sad to see it gone.
- raphman_ 12y ago
  "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."
macco 12y ago
I was a humble #! user for some time. But thinking about it, this little distros a getting less important, cause the big ones got a lot better. Thinking about it, it is a good thing the #! creator focuses on someting different/new. We have to many distros anyway.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  I consider everything running systemd as one distro. That leaves about five distros left, in total.
laydros 12y ago
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.
talles 12y ago
Noooo, #! is one of my favorite distros. Used for quite a while in the past. I stopped using when they switched the base system from Ubuntu to Debian (I know, shame on me) :(
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  Don't beat yourself up. I think I stopped using around the Debian transition also. I remember using #! in VirtualBox as a development environment on a otherwise Windows machine. After #!, I think I used Mint, and now Xubuntu.
thatsjustcrazy 12y ago
A sad day indeed. Brings me back to my days of obsessively sampling every flavor of Linux out there.
oldpond 12y ago
I loved crunchbang. The installer was great. It got from zero to everything you needed for a development box in 15 minutes. Thanks for all your work!
nadams 12y ago
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.
- eloisant 12y ago
  I don't know, whenever I need to download a distro like Ubuntu I do it via torrent. For some reason it's way faster than downloading from the CDN.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - nadams 12y ago
    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.
- 6581 12y ago
  There are mirrors - I guess they're unofficial though and not being linked to on the download page because of that.
  - nadams 12y ago
    I tried some of the unofficial mirrors - the ones I could find did not have the latest version.
muyuu 12y ago
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.
logn 12y ago
The web site is slow under the load. https://archive.today/QhASD https://archive.today/QhASD
morganvachon 12y ago
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.
- jwjones 12y ago
  Slackbang, easy... http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com/p/project-slackbang.html http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com/p/project-slackbang.htm...
  - morganvachon 12y ago
    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.
pearjuice 12y ago
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.
- me_bx 12y ago
  well, there's more in it: * a nice openbox config * an exceptionally great community.
- wooger 12y ago
  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.
chanux 12y ago
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.
emehrkay 12y ago
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.
arca_vorago 12y ago
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.
undersuit 12y ago
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.
novalis78 12y ago
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.
- novaleaf 12y ago
  as the article mentions, give debian a try. It's everything you just described about crunchbang.
  - wooger 12y ago
    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.
    - novalis78 12y ago
      any suggestions besides Lubuntu and Xubuntu? Something that's closer to the simplicity and "just working" state of crunchbang?
      - smellf 12y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009691
      - edwintorok 12y ago
        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.
nailer 12y ago
As a mid-level Unix person (around 18 years) I'd heard 'hash bang' and 'shebang' but never 'crunch bang' to describe the interpreter before. I wonder where the term 'crunch' for pound/hash came from? Edit: looks like it's been around a while: http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html
stolio 12y ago
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.
LukeB_UK 12y ago
Google cache because their site seems to be struggling: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php%3Fid%3D38916 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
- ipavl 12y ago
  It's also cross-posted here: https://corenominal.org/blog/the-end https://corenominal.org/blog/the-end
zeroviscosity 12y ago
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.
carlivar 12y ago
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.
- BFay 12y ago
  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.
forlorn 12y ago
So, no other maintainers are willing to continue working on it?
- smellf 12y ago
  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"?
kancer 12y ago
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.
jblow 12y ago
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? Instead, this is the situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions 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/ http://www.linuxmint.com/
danneu 12y ago
Crunchbang is the only lightweight distro that completely worked on my 2008 10" Atom netbook. I used that thing for three years when I was a student. It's my favorite distro, I'm thankful for it, and it's sad to see it come to an end.
vohof 12y ago
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!
ykzrtj 12y ago
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.

203 points by _JamesA_ 12y ago

cms07 12y ago

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.

sauere 12y ago

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.

phaer 12y ago
What's so "bloated" about Debian with task-lxde-desktop, or task-xfce-desktop?
- dewarrn1 12y ago
  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.
  - phaer 12y ago
    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.
    - morganvachon 12y ago
      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).
  - theandrewbailey 12y ago
    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.

samspenc 12y ago

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.

DanBC 12y ago
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?
valarauca1 12y ago
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.
- willvarfar 12y ago
  CrunchBang was Debian-based, right?
  - theandrewbailey 12y ago

johntaitorg 12y ago

Nooooo Crunchbang is perfect

aroch 12y ago

Archbang is still under active development, thankfully

quakkels 12y ago
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.) [edit] It seems to be working again.
- aroch 12y ago
  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.
Socketubs 12y ago
Is Archbang desktop configuration far from #! or very similar ?
- aroch 12y ago
  They're pretty comparable, I like archbang a little better in terms of their defaults but that's only if I'm being picky.

slfnflctd 12y ago

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.

cubano 12y ago
Peppermint is working pretty good for me these days.
theandrewbailey 12y ago
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.
JasonFruit 12y ago
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.
smellf 12y ago
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 http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wattos

perturbation 12y ago

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.

therealidiot 12y ago
I tried updating a #! (Wheezy) system to Debian Jessie a while back. Massive breakage.
- laydros 12y ago
  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-.
  - phillc73 12y ago
    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.
    - aaren 12y ago
      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.

johnatwork 12y ago

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 will surely miss it.

ethagnawl 12y ago

I've been running #! for the last 1.5 years and it's been a pleasure to work with. Many thanks to @corenominal and the other contributors for their efforts over the last few years.

darkFunction 12y ago

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.

william20111 12y ago

very sad to see this happen. Hopefully somebody takes over and guides the project from here. They have made a great distro with the openbox wm.

spiralpolitik 12y ago

Sad news. CrunchBang was a great little distribution. A couple of rough edges, but it was a refreshing change from Ubuntu or Debian.

rak 12y ago

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. Sad to see it go. Thanks for everything.

seldonPlan 12y ago

The link seems to be dead for me. What was the reason #! is ending? I really enjoy this distro. Very sad to see it gone.

raphman_ 12y ago
"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."

macco 12y ago

I was a humble #! user for some time. But thinking about it, this little distros a getting less important, cause the big ones got a lot better. Thinking about it, it is a good thing the #! creator focuses on someting different/new. We have to many distros anyway.

anonbanker 12y ago
I consider everything running systemd as one distro. That leaves about five distros left, in total.

laydros 12y ago

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.

talles 12y ago

Noooo, #! is one of my favorite distros. Used for quite a while in the past. I stopped using when they switched the base system from Ubuntu to Debian (I know, shame on me) :(

theandrewbailey 12y ago
Don't beat yourself up. I think I stopped using around the Debian transition also. I remember using #! in VirtualBox as a development environment on a otherwise Windows machine. After #!, I think I used Mint, and now Xubuntu.

thatsjustcrazy 12y ago

A sad day indeed. Brings me back to my days of obsessively sampling every flavor of Linux out there.

oldpond 12y ago

I loved crunchbang. The installer was great. It got from zero to everything you needed for a development box in 15 minutes. Thanks for all your work!

nadams 12y ago

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.

eloisant 12y ago
I don't know, whenever I need to download a distro like Ubuntu I do it via torrent. For some reason it's way faster than downloading from the CDN.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- nadams 12y ago
  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.
6581 12y ago
There are mirrors - I guess they're unofficial though and not being linked to on the download page because of that.
- nadams 12y ago
  I tried some of the unofficial mirrors - the ones I could find did not have the latest version.

muyuu 12y ago

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.

logn 12y ago

The web site is slow under the load. https://archive.today/QhASD https://archive.today/QhASD

morganvachon 12y ago

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.

jwjones 12y ago
Slackbang, easy... http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com/p/project-slackbang.html http://all-things-linux.blogspot.com/p/project-slackbang.htm...
- morganvachon 12y ago
  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.

pearjuice 12y ago

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.

me_bx 12y ago
well, there's more in it: * a nice openbox config * an exceptionally great community.
wooger 12y ago
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.

chanux 12y ago

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.

emehrkay 12y ago

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.

arca_vorago 12y ago

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.

undersuit 12y ago

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.

novalis78 12y ago

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.

novaleaf 12y ago
as the article mentions, give debian a try. It's everything you just described about crunchbang.
- wooger 12y ago
  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.
  - novalis78 12y ago
    any suggestions besides Lubuntu and Xubuntu? Something that's closer to the simplicity and "just working" state of crunchbang?
    - smellf 12y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9009691
    - edwintorok 12y ago
      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.

nailer 12y ago

As a mid-level Unix person (around 18 years) I'd heard 'hash bang' and 'shebang' but never 'crunch bang' to describe the interpreter before. I wonder where the term 'crunch' for pound/hash came from? Edit: looks like it's been around a while: http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html

stolio 12y ago

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.

LukeB_UK 12y ago

Google cache because their site seems to be struggling: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php%3Fid%3D38916 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...

ipavl 12y ago
It's also cross-posted here: https://corenominal.org/blog/the-end https://corenominal.org/blog/the-end

zeroviscosity 12y ago

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.

carlivar 12y ago

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.

BFay 12y ago
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.

forlorn 12y ago

So, no other maintainers are willing to continue working on it?

smellf 12y ago
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"?

kancer 12y ago

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.

jblow 12y ago

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? Instead, this is the situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions 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/ http://www.linuxmint.com/

danneu 12y ago

Crunchbang is the only lightweight distro that completely worked on my 2008 10" Atom netbook. I used that thing for three years when I was a student. It's my favorite distro, I'm thankful for it, and it's sad to see it come to an end.

vohof 12y ago

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!

ykzrtj 12y ago

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.