Linux Distro Review: Crunchbang++ 11

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video we're going to check out the latest release of crunchbang plus plus which is a super lightweight spin of debian that essentially no one is using and that's a shame because it's very awesome and we're going to take a look at this distribution in this video now crunch bank plus plus is a continuation of crunchbang itself which unfortunately met its end sometime in 2015 and that was a really sad day for me because crunchbang was one of my favorite distributions something that i featured on this channel early in the life of this channel so again that was really sad thankfully crunchbang plus plus as well as another distribution by the name of bunsen labs they keep the spirit of crunchbang alive so as sad as it was to see crunchbang go i'm not sad anymore because we have other distributions that are basically keeping the spirit alive but what exactly is crunchbang that's a really weird name for a distribution well let's go ahead and dive in and i'll show you and here it is crunchbang plus plus is installed fresh on my hard disk and it's ready to go now real quick i wanted to mention that i had to lower the resolution of my display down to 1080p so if it looks blurry or strange at all well that's why so why did i lower the resolution well i'll talk about why later on in the review anyway here's crunchbang plus plus and all its glory now you might be thinking that the layout is very simple and if that's what you're thinking well you're right crunchbang itself has always been a lightweight and super simple distribution and since crunchbang plus plus is a continuation of crunchbang itself then it makes sense that it's also lightweight and features a very simple layout now we have this welcome screen right here which i'll be covering later on in the video so i'm going to minimize that for now as you can see the desktop is well empty we actually have a conchi display here on the right which is awesome i mean when's the last time you saw a conkey in a distribution anyway we have a panel up here at the top and it actually has two tabs as you can see each tab is a workspace we have a system tray up here on the upper right along with the clock and if you click on the clock it shows a calendar as you would probably expect but how do you launch an application i mean where's the applications menu well actually the applications menu is available via right-click so you right-click anywhere on the screen anywhere that's empty and as you can see wherever the mouse cursor is and you right click that's actually where the applications menu or the open box menu will show up now i'll go more into detail about what all that means in just a moment but real quick we have all the applications that you would expect in a distribution right here from the start so if i click on web browser here's firefox so as you can see firefox is the default browser of course we have a terminal emulator as well and i really like this one this is terminator so let me go ahead and minimize this terminator is awesome you can think of terminator like tmux in your gui and tmux itself is a terminal multiplexer that i've featured videos on this channel for quite a few times now but you could right-click anywhere on the terminal actually i'll just make it full screen first but you could right-click anywhere here you could split it vertically you could also split it horizontally so this is pretty cool you could essentially just have multiple terminals in one window and terminator itself is my terminal emulator of choice even on gnome so terminator is something that i install on pretty much every installation of linux that i have in addition to that for the text editor we have genie and genie itself is my number one favorite gui text editor another application that i make sure i have installed on every computer and one of the things that i love about genie is that it has really good support for programming languages built right in so right here we have a build menu we have options such as make we also have an option for execute as well so if you're writing a script or something like that you can execute it right from here now this isn't a programming tutorial or anything like that so showing you that in more detail is a bit outside the scope of this video but the point is genie is a full-featured text editor and is something that i consider an essential application whenever i set up a new linux install of course we have a media player and in this case it's actually vlc but there's other applications that are worth checking out as well for example filezilla hex chat we already went over vlc you have an application for burning optical media if you still do that kind of thing we have built in so pretty much everything you need out of the box is already here and what i love most about it is that this distro is just fast i mean really fast for the most part depending on your hardware most applications will launch instantaneously my laptop here has an ssd so let's go ahead and launch another app and let's see how fast it loads preferably something that i haven't already opened so let's open the file manager boom every now and then i might edit parts of videos that i do on my channel to speed them up a little bit but i didn't edit that that's literally how fast the file manager opens up so here we have thunar as the default file manager let me go ahead and confirm that and yes it is definitely thunar version 4.16 and that's a pretty good file manager so again everything you need is right here out of the box and it's definitely a very unique setup to say the least so some of you guys that are watching this video you're probably wondering which desktop environment is this and can i get this installed on other distributions of linux well yeah you can install this on other distros and i'll get more into that later on in the video but it's actually not using a desktop environment at all instead crunchbang plus plus uses a window manager specifically openbox now there's a very important distinction between a desktop environment and a window manager a window manager is traditionally a component of a desktop environment a window manager its job is to show windows on your screen that's how you can you know open firefox and then it shows up you can resize the window you can maximize it and things like that now in addition to a window manager a desktop environment will also include many other things that give you a complete experience so open box is just actually a window manager no more no less but the thing is crunch bang and now crunch bang plus plus it gives you a complete experience with open box as the base now open box itself like i mentioned is just a window manager and that's how i can have this window showing on the screen right here because open box is taking care of that for me but we have other components here as well that open box itself normally doesn't even include for example here we have a conchi display that's not part of open box this panel that's not part of open box in fact this system tray this clock none of that is part of open box these are all customizations and additional software that the developer of crunchbang plus plus has included to give you a better experience essentially quality of life improvements now one thing that is included in open box is the right click menu that's an open box thing so if you were to install open box on another distribution what you would have is a window manager the ability to show a window and you would also have a right-click menu as well but you wouldn't have this panel this conkey the system tray you wouldn't even have this wallpaper by default you would have nothing but a blank screen and a right-click menu so crunch bang plus plus features quite a bit of work to make open box act more like a desktop environment even though it's not a desktop environment and that's actually what makes crunchbang plus plus such an awesome distribution the quality of life improvements that it gives you are top notch so basically you could benefit from a window manager and the resource savings that come along with using a window manager but also be able to do things such as connecting to a wi-fi network as you can see right here i have a menu that i can use to connect to a different wi-fi network that's not something that you normally get in open box but you do get that here in crunchbang plus plus now as an aside debian which is what crunchbang plus plus is built on normally doesn't facilitate wi-fi adapters that require proprietary drivers but here as you can see i have a listing of wi-fi networks and the thing is crunch bang plus plus builds that right into the distro and i think that's really important because sometimes getting wi-fi to work in debian can be a pain but it's not a pain here i didn't have to install anything i didn't have to tweak anything in fact wi-fi was available right from the installer and that's cool now crunch bank plus plus looks very simple and it is but there's quite a bit to explore here for example right here we have shortcut keys so i mean we could actually right click anywhere on the desktop to launch an application but with these shortcut keys we have quick access to some popular applications for example if i hold down super and press w the web browser appears that's awesome if i hold super and press t then a terminal window appears not to be outdone i can hold super and press h and then we get h top but anyway the resource usage of crunchbang is very minimal which is one of its strong sides so as simple as crunchbang plus plus is there's a lot to love and a lot to discover now earlier in the video i mentioned that crunchbang plus plus was one of two continuations of crunchbang the other one being bunsen labs now bunsen labs is also a very cool distribution as well something that i recommend you check out but bunsen labs in my opinion is just not crunch bang and what's weird about bunsen labs is that it's often considered the official continuation of crunchbang which to me makes no sense at all because bunsen labs as great as it is it win its own direction so even though it got its start from crunchbang it doesn't look like crunch bang and like i mentioned it with its own direction now by comparison crunchbang plus plus is almost exactly identical to crunchbang so if you're a fan of crunchbang then crunchbang plus plus keeps the spirit alive literally it's exactly the same but updated on a newer base now another thing that i don't like about bunsen labs when compared to crunch bang plus plus is that crunch bang plus plus is almost if not always the first on the scene with a new version every time debian releases a new release of debian stable debian 11 was released this month in august and this same month we have crunchbang plus plus built on debian 11. so with crunchbang plus plus being the first on the scene with a new release as soon as debian releases a new version of stable and bunsen labs not only not being exactly like crunchbang but also being late to the party then in my opinion crunchbang plus plus is absolutely the way to go between the two but let's rewind a little bit and talk about the installation process like other distributions crunchbang plus plus is downloaded as an iso image after you write that iso image to a flash drive and then you boot from it you are given an option to start in live mode or proceed directly into the installation process one potential downside here is that if you want to install crunchbang plus plus you have to boot directly into the installer what that means is that you can't just boot into live mode and then later activate the installer from within live mode it's one or the other but i guess that's not really a big deal you could test the distribution in live mode make sure that all your hardware is working and is compatible and then if you're satisfied you just reboot and choose the installer option from the first menu another quirk that i noticed with the installation image is that it doesn't automatically log you in when you started in live mode on my end i just guessed when it comes to the username and password i just typed live for both the username and the password and it worked now i would have preferred automatic login when it comes to live mode but now you know the username and password so i guess it doesn't matter the installer itself is basically standard debian with a bit of crunch bank branding thrown in if you've ever installed debian before then you should have no problem installing crunchbang plus plus you simply answer all the questions that it asks you and that's it so the installer isn't going to be accused of being the best distro installer out there but it gets the job done so it does what it needs to do and after you install crunchbang plus plus you are immediately presented with this welcome screen right here and i just love the fact that this welcome screen is presented in a terminal window it's just geeky and fun but it's also super easy you just answer the questions that it asks you and that's all there is to it so what i'll do is just make this a bit bigger make sure you guys are able to see this so right now it's telling me that i can hit any key to continue and the first thing it's going to ask me to do is update my package sources so i'll just press enter i'll type in my super secret password and now it's given me an option to install all available package updates which i'll just press enter to accept the default of yes now it's asking me if i would like to enable printer support i do have a printer so i'll press enter now it's asking me if i'd like to install a java runtime and i don't personally have a use for that so i'll just say no and on this screen it's giving me an option to install libreoffice which i definitely want so i'll press enter and at this point it's going to give me the option of installing development packages but i'm just going to say no for now you can always relaunch this welcome screen at any time by simply typing cbp hyphen welcome so i think you get the point and now crunchbang plus plus is fully configured i went through the welcome screen and it's ready to go and what a great distribution crunchbang plus plus is i just love it so at this point what i'm going to do is tell you guys the pros and the cons the things i love and the things i don't love as much about this distro and the first thing is that it's just fast i love how fast crunchbang plus plus is if you're using this on a resource starved computer then i think you'll be well served by crunchbang plus plus because it stays out of the way it doesn't saturate your system resources and that's awesome also if you are a fan of the crunchbang of old then you'll especially love crunchbang plus plus because it's absolutely a faithful reincarnation of that distribution and literally all of the charm of crunchbang is present in this release it's built on debbie and stable now dubbing 11 the latest version of debian so you have the core of debian at your disposal and the charm of crunchbang i mean we have all the applications that we could ever want in a distribution and everything here like i mentioned earlier is exactly the way i remember it from the days of old i mean when's the last time that you were able to roll up a window if i just turn my mouse wheel slightly while i'm hovering over a window border then a window is shaded which can actually for some people be a better alternative than minimizing an application there's just a lot to love about this distribution and perhaps the best part is that we have at our disposal the entirety of debian software repositories and with debian containing what's probably the biggest software repository in the entire linux community and that means basically anything that you can install in debian you can install here in crunchbang plus plus because crunchbang plus plus is debian so here in synaptic we can see here that we have 58 641 packages available that's what it says down here on the lower left hand corner and well you could just browse through the different categories here and install whatever you want and i think having full compatibility with debian software is one of the great things about crunchbang plus plus you have all the software at your disposal while it's also not saturating your system resources so your machine should run its absolute fastest in crunchbang plus plus so when it comes to downsides one of the things that i noticed here is that high dpi support is practically non-existent so i have a 4k display on this laptop right here and like i mentioned earlier i had to lower the resolution down to 1080p just to make it show up well in this video now the thing is with enough tweaking you can actually make crunch bang plus plus look fine on a newer high definition display but you have to do that work on your own and the thing is since crunchbang plus plus is built on open box that means that you have to hand edit all of your configuration files so if i right click here on the desktop and i go to settings there's a bunch of different subcategories here and some of these will actually just open the config file so for example if i go down here to open box we do have a gui config tool that we can use so we can actually customize some of the preferences here and that's pretty cool so for example i could just increase the number of virtual desktops that we have available so now i have four so we do actually get some control over open box via the gui but unfortunately it's a bit inconsistent some options here will actually just open the config file and the thing is this can be a bit daunting to a new user but i think the fact that you have to hand edit some configuration files could actually be a positive for some people if you are an intermediate to advanced user which is probably what crunchbang plus plus targets anyways then in that case i'm sure you probably don't mind hand editing config files also if you're a beginner and also a control freak at the same time with a bit of patience then you probably won't mind hand editing config files either now one positive about this is that once you do hand edit the configuration files and make the changes that you want to make you can basically back up those config files to a safe place like a flash drive or even version control and then if you ever reinstall crunchbang plus plus in the future you just copy those files back to crunchbang in the appropriate places and then you're good to go so essentially you only have to go through that pane one time and then you're done so even though i listed this as a negative i think for some of you this might actually be a positive it just really depends on how you look at it now if you're like me and you just enjoy tweaking and customizing your linux desktop exactly the way you like it then you'll probably love crunchbang plus plus because it gives you full control over virtually everything and like i mentioned because all of its settings are in text files you can simply back up those text files overall i think crutchbang plus plus is an awesome distribution and i highly recommend that each and every single one of you guys all of you linux fans out there definitely try this distro out i want to make sure that it gets more exposure because i think it's really sad that virtually no one has heard of this distribution and it's a great distribution so definitely check it out and when you do let me know in the comments below what you thought of crunchbang plus plus anyway thank you guys so much for watching this video i appreciate that make sure you click that like button if you did like this video that lets youtube know that you want to see more content just like this and i'll see you again very soon [Music] so [Music]

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 17,585

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, debian, debian 11, debian bullseye, review, distro review, linux distro, lightweight, window manager, openbox, crunchbang, crunch bang, crunchbang++, bunsen, bunsenlabs, distro reviews, gnu/linux (operating system), crunchbang linux, debian gnu/linux (operating system), linux laptop, linux os

Id: jrP2I4v1U-M

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dethaxe]

It was a really good review I installed it on my mini PC and learning all hell of a lot

[u/New-Good-316]

Thank for the great review. You always turn out great content.

Your review inspired me to install CB++ 11 on my Asus Eeepc 1000HE, 250 gig SSD with 2 gig of ram. Installation was faultless, wifi and hardwired worked perfectly.

Thank You!

[u/awesomecubed]

I've been thinking about nuking Windows on my Dell XPS 13 and running CB++ but I'm worried about the display. Will I be unable to run a res of 2048 x 1152? What about 1920 x 1080?

[u/rayjnorris]

Great review ... thanks for taking the time ... succinct, direct, useful!