Other Distro Talk

[huggybear]

I agree with b.

[notthatguy]

Been looking at CrunchBang. Seems simple looking and very fast. What do you guys think about it? Anyone tried it?

my computer achieved 2mph when I threw it out the window yesterday which is fast compared to my turtle but still slow compared to my car....

[jheaton5]

Been looking at CrunchBang. Seems simple looking and very fast. What do you guys think about it? Anyone tried it?

my computer achieved 2mph when I threw it out the window yesterday which is fast compared to my turtle but still slow compared to my car....

[Beewolf]

b) the lack of a *mindset* that results in things like our Social Contract, a 100% free kernel by default, package signing from day 1, the whole Freedom Box thing, and the separation of blobs into it's own non-free section. so on and so forth...Debian strives for freedom, quality, and security. Arch to me seems to not really care all that much.

That's a good point - Arch doesn't really seem to have any sort of raison d'etre, beyond maybe KISS design. Even Gentoo's more purposeful.

[CiaW]

@caulfield, ref !# Crunchbang, it uses Openbox DE, and everything is pretty grey unless you figure out how to add some color. I have enough grey on my head, I don't want a grey desktop.

I used it for a short while on my laptop, but it had the same issues on it with the system time that I had using Mint, though it was a bit faster. Oddly enough, when I installed Debian squeeze with the xfce desktop on that laptop, those time issues went away. Squeeze has been working great until recently when it tells me the kernel crashed or something when I wake it up from suspend mode. Though it mostly still works fine after the 'crash', too. And the newer version of !# will be based on Debian testing, it's in beta (or alpha?) now.

Just a few weeks ago I wanted to do a clean install of wheezy on my pc, but the weekly build iso wouldn't finish the install (using the lxde / xfce CD), so I checked on Crunchbang and saw the testing CD and used that to install, then added the Mate repo to use a Mate desktop. After using it about a week, I discovered that some of their defaults weren't quite the same as Debian (such as no root user, but instead using sudo all the time.... I hate that!), so I found a Debian wheezy install CD that was a little older than the weekly build and got rid of Crunchbang.

However, ymmv. And, if you want you can always install the openbox desktop on Debian and play with conky to dress it up a bit. There's a conky how-to under the How-to section, I believe. If nothing else, I did like the Crunchbang community, when I spent a little time hanging out on their forums.

[notthatguy]

I really wish people could explain/describe what is faster in order to have a discussion about why/how something is faster (assuming it actually is) rather than just saying 'it' is faster.

Crunchbang is perfectly adequate but I find no reason to use it instead of debian. Of course I would probably say the same about every debian based distro.

[huggybear]

if arch is faster than debian, then it's simply just configuration and newer packages.

[notthatguy]

I loaded arch with kde4 and all kinds of startup services and it was slow as a turd compared to a my ultra minimal debian install with icewm. Go figure.

[Leos1]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/freedombox/

[caulfield]

I tried out Slackware.

If anyone ever says Debian is not newbie/user friendly, remind me to aim and shoot.

Anyway, don't know how to setup internet in my dorm with wicd, so i'll try it with network manager (found some .txz packages for it online), and see if it works, and then try to learn a thing or to.