End of CrunchBang

The article I read is: A eulogy to CrunchBang, the Linux distro that time passed by (which appeared as "The Death of a Linux Distro" on my phone).

While I've seen CrunchBang, I never had a chance to test it out, since it wasn't something that interested me much.

Though I've only kind of seen 5 years worth of Linux in the making (the majority of it being openSUSE), it still has come a long way.

I haven't really done too much with Linux besides using and learning (more or less), so I won't call myself a hobbyist, but I have had the thought of respinning openSUSE, Gparted Live, and perhaps another distribution that I can't recall right now - though I've never really followed through with any of it. One of the reasons being that I just haven't really had that much of a need to (Gparted Live's a bit different though), since I can just install everything I need to from the base image without much problem.

It's quite true that most distributions are a lot more flexible now - allowing a variety of window managers to be installed and used (though having to put up with something before being able to use it.

To a point, it reminds me of Firefox, where after one point in time, Mozilla pulled the plug on supporting the Power PC architecture. Yes Mac OS X 10.4.x was outdated at that time, and the statistics that they were seeing was low enough for them to decide to remove support. A group decided to make a port of Firefox for PPC and 10.4.x/10.5.x called TenFourFox which allowed anyone with PPC an Mac OS X 10.4.x/10.5.x to still use an updated version of Firefox.

One of the problems was that the version was quite behind, but eventually the group closed the gap when Firefox 30 something came out, which was quite nice. But after discovering that Debian works quite well for PPC, there isn't a whole lot of need to use Mac OS X (only for the legacy emulation). In short, I mean that the TenFourFox group will probably have to pull the plug at some point, once Mac OS X 10.4.x/10.5.x is no longer a good idea to use.

Yes there are people out there using PPC machines, but at some point, they may (or may not) switch to Linux, since it's a lot more up to date than Mac OS X 10.4.x/10.5.x will ever be. Another thing is that there's a lot of removed support for Mac/PPC, so at some point the user will either have to continue using the last supported version of a software, or decide to make a better move.

Sure any group/distro has the ability to remove their support for the PPC architecture, but it's honestly hard to say, since it's really the only way to keep any PPC machine running until the processor gives out.


Anyway, cheers to the good run for CrunchBang, though I never gotten to know it, and to Philip Newborough for taking the initiative of filling the needed lightweight Linux gap.