Now Even Crunchier

The beauty of Linux is that it comes in all sorts of flavours, for all sorts of uses. As much as I prefer my own Linux at home, there are times when I am at an office or someone's house and the only option I have is Windows. I like to carry a USB thumbdrive with both Linux and PortableApps on.

A thumbdrive distro has to be light enough to use in a wide variety of PCs, it has to support a wide variety of hardware, it also has to have a wide variety of commonly used apps installed so the repos must be of a decent size. This is the point where I introduce Crunchbang Linux to the stage. The latest build is Debian based, which makes it idle lighter.

I haven't had the time to properly sit down and install various apps that I need, sort the menu out or Conky. Most of that is still set to the default. I have played with the window borders, fonts, and the Tint2 configuration.

The only flaw in this current setup is a cosmetic one in that the wallpaper is set for 1024x600 from my netbook and will stretch and distort to fit different resolutions. This isn't so big of a deal as I plan to have a small selection of wallpapers at different resolutions to quickly switch if I'm planning to use it for any length of time.

This is not a review post, I don't tend to do reviews. I used to switch between Crunchbang and Linux Mint every few months before feeling my home was in Linux Mint. I had watched Crunchbang seemingly stop doing new versions after 9.04.1 only to find that they were moving to a rolling Debian release. Like many people this was enough to ink it firmly into the "must keep an eye on that" category. It did seem to take a long time to get to a stable release. The wait is well worth it however.

Outwardly it doesn't seem to have changed very much, the refinements seem to be mostly subtle, like the calendar on the left clicking of the clock. It comes in both XFCE and Openbox iso's. I make no secret of the fact that my preferred environment is XFCE of which the Crunchbang XFCE idles at around 85mb which is VERY light. Compare that to the current Xubuntu / Mint XFCE which come in at just over 200mb to do the same thing. This is a perfect example of XFCE being a medium weight DE (Desktop Environment), it's all down to how it's implemented.

One part of the Crunchbang implementation which turned me off is the fact that they combine /home/desktop and /home. The result is that your home folder and it's cntents show on the desktop. This is an unusual idea, KDE4 has a folder view plasma widget which does a similar thing, but in XFCE it's unusual. The problem is that for a long time I've liked a clean desktop with no icons at all. I grew VERY annoyed in Windows with the way applications spew out their icons and are hell bent on cluttering up your workspace. After discovering this thing called Linux, I brought that preference across with me; it's much easier to control on Linux as you have to manually add launchers. Needless to say it's not a function I use. For this reason I use the Openbox version, as it does not do desktop icons without an additional app. The Openbox version of Crunchbang idles at around 80mb.

One odd thing I found is that I tired to install to one USB thumbdrive from another created by Unetbootin, but it consistently failed to boot. I had to burn a CD to get the live environment up, to install it. Other than that little quirk, I really can't fault Crunchbang. The default font size is on the small side for my eyesight which makes it unsuitable as a live environment; I'm not going to waste my time increasing the font sizes in various places every time I reboot. Crunchbang has always had the small font issue, this is not a new thing. It's also a personal thing.

This is not an revolution, it's an evolution. Crunchbang has successfully evolved from an Ubuntu to a Debian base. There's little in the way of radical change for the sake of change. Everything feels very light and stable. Having the Debian repos at your disposal means that there's a huge range of applications at the end of an apt-get install command. If you haven't tried Crunchbang before, or not in in a while I'd seriously recommend giving it a go. You don't know what you're missing. It also makes an excellent netbook distro.