Corenominal, the Crunchbang creator had gone Microsoft Windows!

**buzzingrobot** · June 29th, 2015

Originally Posted by mastablasta

just because it looks similar to KDE or something like that on pictures doesn't mean it acts and runs in the same way. you know Windows is not Linux...

Yep. The two operating systems are very, very different. The most fundamental difference: Linux is a Unix, Windows is not. Linux and OS X have considerably more in common than either does with Windows.

For an ordinary user, of course, who interacts with the GUI, how the actual OS works is less important. GUI's are designed to mesh with user experience and expectations (so they seem "intuitive", meaning icons and such behave the same way on any platform). From a user's perpective, GUI's tend to paper over the differences between operating systems.

Win10 does look to me to be shaping up as a very nice Windows release for folks who need or want to use Windows. The visual similarity with KDE has always been there thanks to KDE's obvious choice to emulate Window's GUI design to attract users. Win10 and the new KDE both show the influence of the current flat-ness fad.

**Chanath** · June 29th, 2015

I was reading your comments and reading a bit about Crunchbang and corenominal. It is not about Windows 10 might be better than Win 7, its about corenominal dumping Crunchbang and going away. After releasing last Crunchbang release called Waldorf in 2013 (!) he hadn't done any development on that distro.

There was a massive fight going on Crunchbang forums, about what had been actually done on that Waldorf distro. A guy had been telling the present community that all corenominal had done was only changing some looks of Openbox WM, but nothing on the kernel or whatever. One of the guys had gone out to prove it and had created a distro on the latest Debian 8.1 on Openbox and all the last eye-candy changes, the so-called crunchbang tweaks.

While the new devs (or community devs) of the new Bunsenlabs had only managed to make a script to install those so-called tweaks on a Debian netinstall, which takes more than 1 1/2 hours to install, this guy had created a live dvd and posted it on sourceforge. I had downloaded it and installed it. It looks just like the last known crunchbnag release of 2013, but with Debian 8.1. It is very quick.

Personally, I have no idea, what the bunsenlabs guys are waiting for all this time, but I can understand why corenominal jumped ship, though. Checking this new distro thoroughly, one can see how easy to "create" this Crunchbang. It is called Crunchbang-Monara and, if you guys want check it out, it is in the sourceforge.

**buzzingrobot** · June 29th, 2015

Originally Posted by Chanath

...its about corenominal dumping Crunchbang and going away.

User of FOSS products don't have any right to expect developers to be obligated to them in any way. Corenominal was one person who released his own Debian spin. Support of such a thing is non-trivial. When real life intervenes, people make real-life decisions.

I've seen some of the petty bickering at the CB forums. This sort of thing does seem to happen too often when a FOSS project ends and people decide to fork it. I find it one of the more unattractive aspects of FOSS. If I ever switch entirely to Windows or OS X, it will be in large part to leave that kind of nonsense behind.

**night_sky2** · June 30th, 2015

Originally Posted by mastablasta

the biggest problem I have is that you need to practically buy a new PC in order to upgrade. the system requirements always get higher and higher. and not a little bit higher but a lot. like 2 times as much. eventhough one could run the OS on much less than recommended, you actually need to have 2x as much power and then it's all smooth.

even so in last could of iterations I think they slowed down the OS requirements bumps.

They did because the system requirements for Windows haven't really changed since Windows 7. In fact, Windows 8.1 is better for older hardware because of the various improvements they made under the hood. Windows 10 will have the exact same requirements than 8.1 BTW.

I am running Windows 8.1 on an Dell Inpiron 1525 that came with Vista in 2008. All we did is to add 2 GB of RAM (to make it to 4 GB) and it works really nice.

I am pretty sure I could have gone away with 2GB of RAM (they still sell brand new laptops with similar specs) but even with Ubuntu Unity, 2GB is kind of tight.

**Chanath** · June 30th, 2015

Originally Posted by buzzingrobot

If I ever switch entirely to Windows or OS X, it will be in large part to leave that kind of nonsense behind.

Oh, I hope that'd never happen. I don't want to switch over to Windows at all. I had used OS X, and it is very good, only I won't buy a machine only to use the OS.

**fkkroundabout** · July 1st, 2015

Originally Posted by night_sky2

I am pretty sure I could have gone away with 2GB of RAM (they still sell brand new laptops with similar specs) but even with Ubuntu Unity, 2GB is kind of tight.

but unity is one of the heaviest

^ don't know how old/new the graph is

but this has similar stats: https://renewablepcs.wordpress.com/a...gnome-or-xfce/
and the newest reference for that write up is mid 2013

**mastablasta** · July 2nd, 2015

last one i saw points to KDE 5 taking the lead in "heavyness" again

still in KDE you can usually easilly turn off things and make it light. but for some reason games play faster in unity nowadays (another graph i saw).

i wonder how fast the games Will ruin on win10 since mostly they still make games with Windows in mind.

**buzzingrobot** · July 2nd, 2015

Much software is written to take advantage of as much free memory as it needs as long as its available. That makes sense. These "heaviness" versus "lightness" comparisons need to be taken with a grain of salt. They're accurate only on the machine the tests were run on, with that specific software configuration.

On my systems, with plenty of RAM, Kubuntu's KDE 4.14 and Unity are in the middle ranks of memory use. KDE 5 is a bit hungrier. That does not surprise me, since it is very new and hasn't benefited from the scheduled monthly fixes that were applied to KDE4.

The thing is: Whatever base I have installed, once I load the applications I typically use, memory use is much the same. The differences in memory use I see on the bare OS with no apps running come close to vanishing once those apps are opened.(Firefox is the fattest app in use here, most often. It can exceed 1-gig with several tabs open. Adblock adds 100-150 megs to each tab.)