Zarate goes Crunch Bang
No, I haven’t broken my leg or anything like that, I’ve installed Crunch Bang Linux. I was having some problems with my Ubuntu and because the next version is not going to be released until April I decided to go for a change. Some of the alternatives were Fedora and Debian, but both are also in Beta now.
I’m not sure where I heard about Crunch Bang but got the Live CD, tried it for 3-4 days on a VM and yesterday finally decided to give it a go. Although the change is big, is not massive because CB is based on Ubuntu. So, same package manager, same forums, things go pretty much on the same folders, etc.
What has really, really surprised me is the desktop. CB doesn’t use KDE or Gnome, it uses OpenBox, a very lightweight and minimalistic window manager. Check it out:
Sweeeeeeeeeet. You might be thinking though that the desktop looks very clean just because this is a fresh installation, right? Nope. It’s stays like that forever. How? Simple, you can’t have anything on it. I mean, the Desktop folder exists but its content is just not displayed. I have to say that I usually have a rather tidy desktop anyway, but opening up your machine and getting nothing but a beautiful picture is just relaxing. And yes, you can do that by yourself, but I don’t know many people with that amount of self-discipline. So the pile of temp files and rubbish is still there, but hidden.
Next one. Do you see the start menu? Don’t look for it, you can’t see it. It’s hidden under your right click mouse button and it looks like this:
You can of course edit it to your needs, something that I’m yet to do. And last but not least, have you noticed those statistics on the top-right corner? That’s Conky , a very light, very configurable system monitor. And look at those little beauties below: tons of shortcuts ready to use! If you are a shortcut-aholic like I am, you’ll be delighted.
So far so good, although I’m sure it will annoy me at some point. Now I have to finish the installation (this has been a full re-installation, usually isn’t, but I’ll talk about my experience with Linux installations other day) and I also have yet to discover what I’ve lost during the migration. Because no matter how many systems I’ve reinstalled in my life, I always forget to backup something. If you hear me screaming in a month, now you know why.