Introducing CrunchBang

Now, I'm not affiliated with CrunchBang or corenominal - just a very happy user of CrunchBang, and I'd like to give my own opinions on the distro.


CrunchBang (often referred to as #!) is a light Debian-based distro using Openbox as its window manager. In fact, it could be said (quite correctly) that #! is basically Debian with the Openbox WM on top, but the design, customisability, and lightness makes it really stand out, plus a few of the applications are #!-specific, pinned on top of the underlying Debian distro.

My (customised) CrunchBang desktop

Stable
Seeing as #! is based on the stable branch of Debian, it's very stable and unlikely to break. Contrary to the (not entirely serious) disclaimer on the website that anyone needing a stable system might not want to use it, my experience of #! is that it is very reliable - I've used it for about a year and a half, and it hasn't had any major problems at all.

Light and Fast
The Openbox window manager used by #! is light on system resources, and also very snappy. The default applications installed are similarly light, and so despite my eight-year-old laptop with its 471MiB RAM and single core 1.4GHz Celeron processor, #! boots up in just 28 seconds, and responds quickly.

Customisable
#! is very customisable, and tweaking of the configuration to suit your preferences is encouraged! A very high level of control over settings is achieved by having users actually edit configuration text files directly in most cases, rather than via a graphical settings manager. This approach also encourages users to learn more about the workings of their system, rather than hiding it under a GUI. The beauty of #! is that you are very free to change as much (or as little) of it as you like.

Community
Perhaps the best thing about #!, though, is its community. The #! Forums are very welcoming, and as well as an excellent source of help and support, they are home to lots of sharing of configurations, wallpapers, and themes.

On the other hand...
#!, depending on your existing experience with Linux and your willingess to learn, may not be for you if you don't want to do things like use the command line from time to time, or become fairly familiar with the way the Linux file system works. Don't let that put you off unnecessarily, though - #! is great for learning. Also, if you're after bleeding-edge latest software, #! is probably also not for you (unless you're OK changing the software sources and taking the (not always predictable) consequences.) Especially coming from either a GUI-rich Linux environment or from Windows, #!'s minimalism may come a bit of a shock at first. But if you're willing to learn a little, it's brilliant.

You can download #! to try and/or install it at crunchbang.org