CrunchBang Linux exits the stage

On February 6, CrunchBang Linux founder Philip Newborough announced that he would halt development of the distribution. The reason for the decision, he said, was that the landscape of Linux distributions has changed considerably over the years, and in the current climate, there was no longer a need for CrunchBang. In the long term, of course, distributions (like other free-software projects) come and go, but this announcement was still a sad one for many in the community.

Newborough posted the shutdown announcement on the CrunchBang forum, thanking his wife and the CrunchBang community for their years of support. Regarding the decision to stop development, his comments were brief:

Newborough did say that the CrunchBang forums will remain online, and that he is happy to support them for as long as is necessary. The response from the forum users was swift and sizable; 14 pages (and counting) of messages followed, with almost all expressing a combination of disappointment at the loss of CrunchBang and gratitude to Newborough for his years of coordinating the project.

For those who are unfamiliar with its history, CrunchBang was started in 2008, when netbooks like the Eee PC were first hitting the store shelves. Those machines were notorious for their lack of processing power and memory in comparison with contemporary desktop hardware. The distinction between "low resource" and "standard" hardware specs has become far more blurry in recent years, but when the netbook craze started, it necessitated taking a different approach to provide a usable, responsive desktop environment.

CrunchBang was one of those projects that took such an approach. It bundled Debian with the lightweight Openbox window manager. Openbox is one of several stacking window managers for X, one that can run with significantly less GPU power by omitting window compositing and other graphical enhancements. There have been numerous other "lightweight" desktop distributions over the years, but CrunchBang fans consistently praised the work that went into integrating Openbox with other features so that it serves as a modern environment—and not just a generic package with minimal features. CrunchBang's desktop and GUI themes have always been regarded as well-made, with attention paid to the details, and the project provided a set of well-tested Python scripts to replicate the "modern" features implemented in more heavyweight window managers or desktop shells.

Nevertheless, since 2008 there has been no shortage of "lightweight" desktop distributions available. Another change in recent years is that the Debian community now actively supports Openbox and several other lightweight desktop environments and window managers (e.g., Xfce and FluxBox), making it comparatively simple to set up a CrunchBang-like system.

Still, there is a significant difference between the ability to install and configure Openbox and the ability to boot into a ready-to-use CrunchBang system. Consequently, not everyone on the forum concurred with the notion that vanilla Debian was a suitable CrunchBang alternative. Forum commenters brought up several other potential replacements, such as antiX and Semplice. Both are Debian-based distributions that focus on lightweight window managers—although neither uses OpenBox.

Forum user pvsage announced an effort to explore resurrecting CrunchBang under a new name (initially "Sparkle Dancer" but, more recently, "Debarchery"). Newborough responded to that idea with his encouragement. Users interested in the idea have since started a separate discussion thread on the CrunchBang forum to discuss it. So far, though, progress on a revived distribution remains in the planning stages.

Even if switching to a new distribution (be it pvsage's replacement or an unrelated lightweight distribution) is eventually necessary, the other lingering question is what existing CrunchBang users need to do in order to keep their systems running and up-to-date. Forum user iMBeCil responded that there were plenty of CrunchBang users who would still benefit from seeing the next planned CrunchBang release, tentatively named Janice, actually delivered.

At present, it seems that the Janice release has simply been scrapped altogether, which could understandably be a source of anxiety for users. More than a few forum members asked about the possibility of the community raising funds to underwrite continued development—and, evidently, one forum member even went so far as to set up a fundraising site, although forum moderators subsequently removed the post.

The good news is that the current CrunchBang release, Waldorf, should continue to work with the Debian wheezy repositories for the foreseeable future. And, as forum user tknomanzr commented, adapting Waldorf to work with the Debian jessie repositories works as well, with only "a few hitches" concerning GTK+ themes. There is also a guide available that details the steps to update a Waldorf system to run on top of Debian unstable.

Whenever jessie is released, Debian wheezy will become the oldstable distribution, at which point it will continue to receive backported security updates until the debut of the Debian stable release after jessie. That will add up to a significant amount of time, so the CrunchBang community will not be left in a vulnerable position any time soon.

Still, it is always sad to see a distribution close its virtual doors, and CrunchBang was always a distribution that drew praise for its merits, not on glitz or on dubious claims about performance or style. In short, Newborough and CrunchBang earned fans by executing well. There may yet be a future for many of the ideas that made CrunchBang useful for its user base, but measuring up to CrunchBang's reputation isn't trivial.