Corenominal's original post[1] I thought was entirely reasonable and measured: basically the crunchbang mission can be achieved entirely within a Debian stable install now. However, I suspected that someone would continue the project simply because of the branding and fun factor. And it has happened.
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.
I am not personally capable of making a crunchbang-like distro out of Debian, and I don't like any of the many other distros I've tried. Obviously self-described hackers don't need #! because they can build it. #!'s userbase is diverse. And some of the more capable users just like the settings and can spend their hacking hours elsewhere.
Depends on how they spend their effort. Couldn't most of the unique bits be delivered as additional packages to debian, installing all the extra bits? Then it wouldn't be very much "unnecessary" effort on the way to the system they want (no shipping of packages already available etc)
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 has mentioned that, since CrunchBang has been his project from the beginning, he would like to see the name separated from any derivative that succeeds it.
Not sure if the people responsible for this fork are aware
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mint is what I recommend to friends and aquaintences interested in this Linux thing. But #! is the distro that I enjoyed getting work done in. It hits that aesthetic sweet spot of sparse and functional perfectly for me. So I for one am thrilled to have a Jesse update (making time to hack an update together or fuss with the package update friction is a luxury I just don't have anymore...)
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)
I've been using Crunchbang as my base Debian starter for years now. It's a great distro to get some sensible defaults and then switch over to tracking Debian testing and go from there. Very excited to see a new update!
I _really_ need to understand, why the hell do you guys have such weird emotional allegiances to linux distributions?
Do a ubuntu minimal install and install openbox. In one fell swoop you've created something at least as good as crunchbang! Holy fuck!
I can understand why the l33t skiddie does it; they're anal about spending hours making their desktops shiny and tricked out with chinese cartoon backgrounds. I just expect a little more... productivity from hn.
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.
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.
This is the thing people tend to miss, I think. There are a large number of people who don't like GNOME/KDE/Unity/whatever but who also don't want to take the time and effort to assemble the whole thing from pieces.
I did the same thing with Arch, as well as with Void Linux. Void, in particular, is a distro I find very interesting and would like to use, but the hours I would spend making a usable desktop for myself (assuming I would even succeed, and prior experience has shown that not to be the case) are better spent elsewhere.
The CrunchBang maintainer's reasons for discontinuing the distro are spot on. It's absurd to fork the entire distro, adding a delay on package updates from the upstream distro just for the sake of defining a default set of packages.
Create a complementary apt repo for any packages you need that aren't available upstream (CrunchBang has very few of these), and perhaps spin an installer image that installs Debian with your preferred default package set, but for the love of god, stop adding lag to the process by which your users receive security updates and bugfixes from upstream.
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.
[1] http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=38916