Crunchbang Linux

This could be a long post if I agonized over all the little things that make me want to chuck OSX for Linux, but I'm not going there. I'll just say that I think Gnu/Linux and the tremendous set of open source software that inhabits it is the best environment for a productive developer. Sure a linux VM is nice (I use them for packaging and testing shellsink for linux), but somehow running a VM of linux just doesn't cut it for me.

Soooo, I have gone and dual booted my MacBook Pro. What distro did I pick? Well I like the convenience and hardware support of Ubuntu, but can't stand the bloat of gnome, and even xfce seems slow to me these days. I wanted something lightweight, but easy. And lo and behold look what I have found: a new linux distro called #! Crunchbang Linux. Quoth the Crunchbangers:

CrunchBang Linux is an Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built and customised from a minimal Ubuntu install. The distribution has been designed to offer a good balance of speed and functionality.

I installed it on my mac (after installing refit.) After getting the proprietary nvidia drivers going, all the hardware worked right out of the box (minus the keyboard backlight and light sensors). All I had to do was configure the multitouch and I immediately felt comfortable. It is truly wonderful little distro. No it isn't perfect, and I'm not sure if I'll ever get rid of OSX on my laptop, but I am considering it. Here is a list of things that could be improved (this is probably mostly stuff ubuntu, debian and the upstream packages would have to work out, not crunchbang).

• Short battery life (1 hour vs 3 hours in OSX) due to the wired ethernet driver.
• Decreased Wifi reception (about half the range of the OSX drivers) due to wireless driver.
• Occansional issues with mouse locking up after a suspend (but only since I enabled multitouch).

That is it. Everything is completely usable, but for obvious reasons the crunchbang software isn't as highly tuned to my system as OSX is. I suspect with some research and effort I could mitigate some of these things, for example using ndiswrapper I might be able to use the proprietary wifi driver which supports the hardware better and gets a better signal from it. I never use the wired ethernet so I could probably remove that module from the kernel to improve battery life. If this were a perfect world I could get the best of both worlds, an OS with a philosophy like crunchbang but with the polish of a commercial product. Sigh. Ah well, it is getting better all the time.