Comment by kfk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kfk | Hacker News Reader

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Arch is very lean and it's absurdly up to date. Debian is a monstruosity and even it's testing branch is not as up to date as arch.

However, arch breaks things often, very often. You make updates crossing fingers you will be able to reboot. Debian, crunchbang, overall, is very stable.

It depends what you want. If you are not a linux guru and need to work on your system, then go for something easy and stable like debian, otherwise do go for arch.

--- Edit

Yes, I talked all the time about Debian and I missed #!. Let me say, crunchbang for me it's just an easy way to get a debian testing. I prefer it like this as last time I used Debian it had some rough edges I have no time anymore to smooth over. I want things to work out of the box and a good community, check #!, they actually have a nice welcoming community.

I would say although Arch has a steep learning curve, there's plenty of documentation and tutorials about getting started. I have a machine that runs it and love it and I'm in no way a Linux guru.

I've only had one update issue, otherwise, it's pretty been reliable.

Note that Manjaro (http://www.manjaro.org/) is a "user-friendly" distro based on Arch. I tried it briefly via a liveCD from a British Linux magazine, and it looked promising.

Why do you say Debian is a "monstrosity"? What would that make Ubuntu then?

Where is #! then?

Isn't crunchbang a debian distro with openbox? You can put openbox on any distro you like including arch if that's what you are after.

I know that - I'm just really confused about what crunchbang really is now. So it's just debian with a different default wm?

"Put simply; CrunchBang could be thought of as a layer built on top of Debian, specifically to provide a great Openbox experience."

http://crunchbang.org/about/

That's kinda what I expected, an out of the box OpenBox setup built on top of Debian. It does say they use packages from their repository so there must be some differences than if you did it yourself.

yes, but archbang and crunchbang have nice defaults.

As great as Arch's documentation is (best in all linuces I've tried), I still prefer to have some nice defaults so I can get stuff done whilst learning the knobs.

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