Why do you use #!Crunchbang (Page 3 of 19)

i can absolutely agree with all mentioned above, except 5th point.. have dualboot with xp (those using from time to time for gaming), #! for everything else (work, entertainment).

I tend to fallback to Ubuntu b/c it seems to be the best bet for getting hardware to work out of the box (which is, imho, the most important qualification for distro quality, followed quickly by the other reason which was...) and the selection of packages worked for me.

But Gnome (and particularly Nautilus) never felt right to me--it always felt really slow and laggy, and didn't work the way I wanted to.

My hardware at the time was an old, cheap Acer laptop. Crunchbang was a perfect fit. Since then, I just haven't gone back to Ubuntu--#! is fun and Linuxy.

Linuxy lol...gotta love it ;-)

I have no one reason to use #! in particular, but I did try going solo (non-windows dual booting) for about three weeks before getting Vista back.

Had to get Vista back in order to play video games.  Not even interested in using Wine.

1.)  An operating system that installed to about 1 GB of space.  Windows Vista is sitting at 29.8 GB (No PageFile)
2.)  The #! looks sick.  Its got a wicked color theme (arguably the geekiest with all dark backgrounds white text).
3.)  Conky is pretty sweet.
4.)  OpenBox in my opinion is very nice.
5.)  User friendly - with the ability to learn Linux tricks.
6.)  Not as bloated as Ubuntu.
7.)  Highly Customizable.
8.)  Most of my hardware works right out the box.  Headphone jack still does not in Ubuntu or #!.

Things I wish I got from #!:
1.)  A lite version that as mentioned in other posts was just the skeleton - GDM, OpenBox + Theme, + Conky, and a terminal/webbrowser.
2.)  A 64-bit version.
3.)  Maybe a more thorough documentation wiki.

@cain - have you already seen this: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … t-testing/

For me it was a matter of stability, the programs I could use and the size. No matter how hard I tired, I couldn't get the install size below 4Gigs if i wanted a Linux OS that had most of the things that I wanted.

Kubuntu, Ubuntu and even Debian were nice, but Debian got a little hard for me to build from just the base system. Also (for whatever reason) Kubuntu and Ubuntu would stop working right after awhile starting with it hanging on shutdown and eventually crashing the system altogether.

Crunchbang on the other hand is lightweight, installs in just under 2 gigs, gives me what I want, and it isn't a horrific pain in the butt to configure my Atheros laptop wifi card (built into the laptop) where as with Ubuntu it was.

Pantherman

Since years i use full ubuntu on desktop and laptop computers, i like the easy package base, most thins running out of the box. After buying th 901go i spend 2 weeks with xandros, got pain and headache with their ugly setup. Start a search and found unr, easypeasy, eeebuntu. Most of them are downloaded and startet from sd-card. Most of them are nice but painful slow. Remembered wmaker that was used ten years ago on a 64mb laptop with 800x600. This results in cruncheee, cause it give full ubuntu repos and optimizations for specific hardware features of the eee. I'm a friend of alternate and fast desktops, cruncheee give it to me. Nice!

Tuxfriend

i often have done massive bouts of distro surfing.  my last mainstay distro was sabayon (3.4 & 3.5).  considerably heavier and fuller than #!
i wasnt specifically looking for anything to replace sabayon (and indeed, i havnt, it's still what i use on my main desktop), but since playing with slitaz linux quite a bit, i got into using usb drives for my os alot more.   and then when i found unetbootin, that just set me off surfing distros again.

crunchbang has the weight of the ubuntu community and repository behind it.  thats quite appealing.  but what really has me stay is:

lightweight nippyness,
out of the box considerate configuredness,
it has that "just works" appeal to it too,
it's encouraging of getting the end user under the hood, learning their system's configuration files.

so although it doesnt have some of the genius/stupidity of a gentoo based system that i've grown accustomed to, and instead has some of those awful unique ubuntu ways, this is a minor gripe given it seems to be a distro project that knows where it's heading.  away from bloat, uses the right tool for the job, etc etc etc.

would elaborate further, but that really covers the main points.

So my story:

I grew up with windows, and I've got a great interest in technology so I became very good with it. I always knew about 'linux' for a long time before the really friendly gui / high hardware compatibility came out, i just didnt have the time or skills to get into it. Finally with Ubuntu 7.04 I installed a linux, but had too many hardware problems with an external eSata drive. 7.10 fixed all that, and I have been a big fan of Ubuntu for the longest time. from then till now i've been trying to use linux while maintaining XP for games. I ventured into a few other distros, other ubuntu-based distros like xubuntu and fluxbuntu, went to debian for a bit, tried gentoo (and failed), tried solaris and bsd even for a bit, fedora, suse, and I'm sure a few others. I discovered ubuntu was my favorite, APT was my favorite, and it was simple to setup, and I could customize it at the speed I was able to learn at. If I had no skills, the basic install is great, and then as I learned I was able to customize more and more.

This christmas I got a laptop for university next year (comp sci, will need one), and after realizing I would be on battery most of the time, I tried to get the most of it. A pirated and hacked-to-crap version of XP got me sitting around 2 hours, the vista 32bit basic it came with (with 4gb of ram too. ugh), only got me 50min, so it was definitely an improvement. I figured linux would be able to squeeze me that little bit more.

So i loaded up Ubuntu 8.10, and realized early on that it came with so many applications I wouldn't use at all. It also felt like there were many lighter alternatives to many gnome apps. I switched to Xubuntu, it still wasn't light enough. 9.04 came out, loved the new boot time. Found crunchbang around this time, put it on that puppy, found a few power managing scripts (mainly koopa's), and fell in love. It has me at 2:30 of battery life (almost double of what it had coming from the store).

And this has led me to go a full-#! desktop, even though it was never my intention. Started reading the forums - loved it. Joined. And here I am.

  firefox likes to bloat up after alot of use.  most of the bloating up you'll likely never need to use.  i've recently found it very wise n prudent to give it a clean out every once in a while... and even that might not bring it back to spritelyness you remembered in the begining, in which case sometimes it's savvy to go make yourself another profile in it.  that should bring it back to former glory.   ....those addons do come at a performance premium once you've added a dozen of them. 

google urlclassifier.sqlite to find out how to cleanup/remove this - it's a major cause of slow startup/shutdown.  Also, if your history grows anything beyond a couple of hundred thousand entries or so, ff really starts to choke.  Places may be a big improvement architecturally over the mork format files, but it's broken performance-wise, IMHO.

The other thing I would recommend is use FF3.5.  I've found quite a speed improvement, even comparing a totally blank profile on each version, let alone a profile loaded with bookmarks/history. etc.

FF being unusably slow was why I first tried #!, and now I just can't face the prospect of booting up the ubuntu intrepid still on my disk, even though all my files are still in the home dir of that partition, which I have mounted on /mnt for now.

Last edited by jackbang (2009-07-01 02:53:14)

I work on a laptop aging from 1999 with a screen resolution of 800x600 and a Celeron450. Luckily I have upgraded to the max 256sdram. It's a gift from my dearest friend. So, I want to keep it alive and use it in my bedroom.

The Cloud idea is very interesting, but as now mid 2009. It's just not ready. My priority is having a OS with good response and updated software. Then I've found out that I love trying OSes. They all have their goals and dreams. If you have found one that suits your hardware and your needs, it's wonderful.

This HP become one of the old machines which had tried many and many OSes:
DOS, Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, XP fundamentals, (Sorry no 3.11 or Vista)
Red Hat Linux, DSL, Puppy Linux, xPud, gOS 1.0-3.1, moonOS, Ubuntu's, Xubuntu's, Debian LXDE, Fedora11 LXDE, Ubuntu LXDE, U-lite, Fluxbuntu, Linpux, Mint, GoblinX, Xandros for EEE701(a failed experiment), BackTrack for some WiFi "tests".

CrunchBang Linux finally became as best tested OS for my 'powerful' machine. ALthough DSL & PuppyOS suites entirely in my 256MB, they lack the dynamic of updating( but are still one the best choices beside #!). gOS is way too heavy, maybe they choose to let down the 256mb line.  xPud and other Cloud's are not finished yet. They still act very beta and are machine specific made.

Thanks #! a OS so SMALL, so FOCUSED and still so Flexible!
Recommended for all 256mb machines and beyond.

Last edited by Tony Leung (2009-07-14 09:50:43)