CrunchBang Linux

» see crunchbang.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

You could identify a CrunchBang desktop from across a room. Black background, no icons, no panel along the bottom, and a column of text down the right hand side listing the keyboard shortcuts you were expected to use instead of all the things that were missing. It looked less like a product than like somebody's actual working machine, which is what it was.

The whole distribution was one person. Philip Newborough, a british developer who posted as corenominal, built it, maintained it, wrote the installer scripts and ran the forum. There was no foundation behind it, no company, no sponsor whose logo went at the bottom of the page. That is worth stating first because it explains both why it was good and how it ended.

It appeared in 2008 as a remix of Ubuntu, with 8.10.01 announced at the end of november that year on the Ubuntu 8.10 base. Version 10, Statler, arrived in february 2011 and moved the whole thing onto Debian, which is where it stayed. Release names came from the Muppet Show and had to start with the same letter as the Debian release underneath, so Statler was followed by Waldorf, version 11, on 6 may 2013. That was the last one.

The category it served is one i understand from where i sit. Hardware in Turkey has always carried an import margin on top of its actual price, which makes the machine already on the desk worth keeping alive longer than it would be elsewhere. A distribution whose entire proposition is that your old laptop is not old yet was never a niche interest here.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was for ~

Openbox instead of GNOME was the decision everything else followed from. Nothing compositing the windows, and no desktop framework loading half of itself at login. What you got was a window manager and a text file describing what the keys do. On a machine with half a gigabyte of memory, that difference is the difference between usable and not.

The other half of it was the post-install script. Rather than shipping fifteen applications you would spend an evening removing, it booted into a nearly empty system and then asked what you actually wanted, offering to pull down the development tools or the media codecs if you said yes. That is a small piece of engineering and it made the thing feel personally assembled rather than merely small.

~ the day it died ~

On 6 february 2015 Newborough posted to the CrunchBang forums that he had stopped. The line everyone quoted afterward was that he was leaving it behind because he honestly believed it no longer held any value, and that while he could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, he did not believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian.

He had a point and he knew it was an unwelcome one. Debian had gotten easier to install and lighter to configure over the seven years CrunchBang existed, and a lot of what the distribution had been for could now be done in an afternoon by hand. The thread filled up with thanks rather than argument, which is not how these announcements usually go. The forums went offline afterward, and for a stretch in september 2015 crunchbang.org pointed at its successor instead of at itself.

~ what it became ~

Two forks came out of that thread. CrunchBang++ announced its 1.0 release on 29 april 2015, less than three months after the farewell, and rebuilt the same setup on Debian Jessie. BunsenLabs formed as the community-organized continuation, took the same black Openbox arrangement forward, and is still issuing releases against current Debian a decade later.

crunchbang.org is back up today, serving the old site with a single line saying development has ended and a link to the forum announcement that goes to a page telling you the forums are offline. Nobody has taken the domain away and nobody has turned it into anything. It sits there describing a nimble Openbox Linux distro in the present tense, which is about the gentlest ending available to a piece of software.

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