CrunchBang & Xubuntu Linux

Some interesting events this week, a relative of mine had the terrible experience of being burgled. I hope those responsible are caught and prosecuted, however with crimes of this type its so difficult to find the culprits.

This event left my relatives family with NO computers, i had some old PC hardware that I could supply them, very low spec and frankly I had a dilemma.

Windows XP was the system that my relatives had used for years, they unfortunately had lost their Windows XP install disks as the laptop bag went with the computer.....a lesson for everyone there, keep your install disks separate from your computer.

Thus Linux came to the rescue, this really was interesting from a 'switching from XP to linux' perspective.

The low spec hardware dictated that I could not use Ubuntu Linux or Mint Linux in their standard form, thus i had to find a easy to use desktop that was light on system resources.

After trying out both Crunchbang and Xubuntu in virtual machines (under virtualbox running on my ubuntu desktop) booting from ISO to evaluate the front ends.

I really liked the minimal style of Cunchbang (seen below in the screen shot), the speed on the low spec machine was very impressive, the openbox window manager provided a acceptable user experience. My only concern was the default application

launch menu being initiated by a right-click, which would i feel cause initial discomfort for new users.

I was so impressed by Crunchbang in fact, I moved one of my test machines to this distro.

However from a ease of use point of view i thought my relatives would adopt Xubuntu more readily, simply due to the APPLICATIONS button acting like the XP start button. Also Xubuntu provided a lot more eye candy without using a huge amount of system resources and used open openoffice, which i have more experience in rather than the Abiword and Gnumeric apps supplied as default with Crunchbang.

The PC is now installed, working nicely and with 5 more people converted to Open Source Software. However DO please try Crunchbang linux, its minimal, slick and way fast, however i think its for users with some existing linux desktop experience.