Linux projects come and go. There have been many distributions (distros) with thriving communities that were discontinued for one reason or another. Yet, the announcement of CrunchBang’s demise was shocking. The disbelief and the desire for the project to continue spurned a successor, known as Bunsen Labs. Although unaffiliated with any past CrunchBang developer, CrunchBang++ (#!++) is an attempt to continue the legacy of one of the most loved minimalist distros.
#!++ is based on Debian 8 and uses its installer as well. While this may have given users pause a few years ago, the Debian installer has become increasingly user-friendly in recent releases. The distro, however, is unable to run a live system, which is a downer for some new users trying to decide whether the distro is worth the trouble of installing, but it does have installable medium for both 32- and 64-bit machines.
Once installed the distro drops you to a minimalist OpenBox -based desktop and automatically launches a post-install configuration script that guides you through some configuration options, such as installing printer support or Java Runtime Environment, LibreOffice, LAMP stack etc. It’s not compulsory to run the 12-step script, as it requires a working internet connection, and you can launch it at any time from the terminal with cbpp-welcome.
The desktop lacks a dedicated application menu so a right-click on the desktop reveals the menu in true OpenBox fashion. Although there’s a sizeable collection of default apps, such as IceWeasel browser, VLC media player, Gimp, Abiword, Atril document viewer, Transmission, Filezilla, etc, the more features and commonplace apps, such as LibreOffice and Chrome browser are missing. The distro does provide an installer script for these prominent apps, which saves you the trouble of manually installing them using the graphical Synaptic Package Manager or apt-get tool. Incredibly, the distro similarly provides installers for DropBox and VNC server.
If you’re used to any of the popular flashy looking modern distros, you’ll find the bare grey-themed look rather depressing. However, OpenBox is highly configurable; you can change just about every element of the desktop to get a more colorful desktop if you want.
Apart from reporting the essential system stats, the Conky system monitor on the right of the desktop also lists a number of default keyboard shortcuts, e.g. for launching the file manager, terminal, media player etc. Note: The default shortcuts make use of the Super key so you’ll have to reconfigure if you don’t have one.
Even though the distro ships with only two multimedia tools: VLC and Xfburn to burn discs, it supports a number of formats out of the box and Debian’s non-free repository is enabled by default.
If you spend a lot of time on the command-line, you’ll find commands such as ifconfig can’t be run as a nonroot user. This is because /sbin isn’t included in the $PATH. Run export PATH=$PATH:/sbin to clear up the problem.
Plenty of lightweight distros swap KDE or Gnome for Xfce or LXDE. There are also hosts that leave out the desktop environment entirely and build the GUI along a window manager, such as OpenBox. While #!++ firmly falls in the latter category, the distro has done much more to deliver a very fast system that’s low on resources.
Verdict
We give a total rating of 85/100 for CurnchBang++1.0. This young distro doesn’t even have a forum board (it uses Reddit) but works as advertised. To download CurnchBang++ 1.0, go here.
