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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

by 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

philsnow 12y ago
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 ?
- smellf 12y ago
  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.
wooger 12y ago
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.
- smellf 12y ago
  > 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.

by smellf 12y ago

philsnow 12y ago

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 ?

smellf 12y ago
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.

wooger 12y ago

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.

smellf 12y ago
> 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.