One of my favorite distros, mainly because it was so light on my system at the time, was Debian-based Crunchbang (#!) GNU/Linux. It had a fairly light footprint, and everything moved along quite speedily. Unfortunately, about the time I started using it, it stopped being developed. So, I switched back to Ubuntu and that was that.

Running a GNU/Linux distro on my Microsoft Surfacebook (original model) has been a pain. Although I’ve tried a variety of distros, none of them quite seemed to be as zippy as, well, Windows 10. As a result, I end up spending more time on Windows 10 side than I do on the GNU/Linux side. Ubuntu’s GUI these days runs slow on my machine, and other distros are only a little better. In the end, I keep coming back to Ubuntu.

That is, until I found out by accident that Bunsen Labs carries on the work of #! I was a bit shocked to load it on my Surfacebook and find that it looks and runs very much like #!.

The distribution consists of configuration and resource packages installed on top of Debian. There are no changes to the way the Debian base system is administrated. 

Pre-configured Openbox window manager with tint2 panel and conky system monitor
Assortment of harmonising GTK2/3 themes, wallpapers and conky configurations
Various configuration and application utilities to maintain this system 

Additional desktop-, multimedia- and hardware-related packages come pre-installed to offer a better “out-of-the-box” experience.

What I like about it is how simple the interface was, etc. Not a lot of screens, animations, and other junk that just slows your machine down. Quite functional.

The resolution on a Surfacebook, however, is set too high. That’s a bad thing. Openbox, XFCE, LXDL simply don’t work well on Surfacebook. So, for fun, I went ahead and loaded Gnome (I dislike KDE) then stripped out Openbox, and anything else that Gnome brought in that wasn’t needed. I disabled extensions, loaded Brave, Chromium for my browsers (removing Firefox), and found a light wallpaper.

And, what a pleasant surprise! I now have a system that feels light and airy, with the essential software I need and little more.