Lubuntu vs Crunchbang vs Bodhi

[lento_]

It's distro hopping time on my laptop, and I'm considering which to try out next. Over the last few years I've had Ubuntu, Mint, Xubuntu and most recently Kubuntu on there, but I fancy a change.

Kubuntu looks great, but is a bit slow and clunky on my five year old laptop, so I thought I'd try out a lightweight distro next. But which one?

I use the laptop for playing music (normally with Clementine), watching DVDs and surfing the net. My wife uses it for surfing the net and playing some simple games like tetris, snake, cards, sudoku etc. This means I don't need anything particularly hardcore. I would like it to look nice though - not the fancy cube silliness, but just a nice elegant modern looking theme. Obviously not all look nice out of the box, but a DE/WM which is easy to theme, and has a good choice of themes, would be good.

Having done a bit of reading around, I've narrowed my choice down to Lubuntu, Crunchbang or Bodhi. Any comments, recommendations or arguments about which may be worth trying out?

Lubuntu seems well supported, but I've seen a few worrying comments about trying to network it with windows. Crunchbang sounds very interesting, but I'm not sure if I want the hassle of hours of fiddling around in config files. Bodhi looks like a lot of effort has gone into trying to make it easily configurable, but I don't like how all the themes I've seen for it so far are a bit childish and cartoony.

[sudodus]

Let me suggest to download the iso files of

- Linux Mint Debian XFCE :KS and compare it with
- Lubuntu Precise beta (12.04)

Both distros have all the multimedia stuff installed.

[zhogan85]

+ 1 for crunchbang from me. Based on Debian, so super stable, and while for some things, yes, editing config files may be neccesary, but not to the extent of arch. Download it and give it a try, I think you will be quite pleased, and that may be the end of your distro hopping.

[QIII]

I'm going to give some support to Bodhi. Themes are often a matter of taste. If you don't like them, you don't. No problem there.

Bodhi is exceptionally fast on low-spec machines because of the E17 DE. I've installed it on PIII machines with 128MB RAM (pretty much the minimum specs) and you would never know the machine was a dog.

You can use Bodhi's one-click package system AND the Ubuntu repositories.

[Version Dependency]

I can't comment on Bodhi as I haven't used it. I'm a big fan of LXDE/openbox so I have used both Lubuntu and Crunchbang with success. They make ancient machines run like they are brand new. Lubuntu is a bit more user friendly than Crunchbang as it's based on Ubuntu rather than Debian...but try them out in a virtual machine (along with Bodhi). A few minutes of download time and a hour of install time and you can have all them running in VirtualBox.

[lento_]

So recommendations for all of them then!

Trying them out in a VM sounds like a good idea, as long as that would give a reasonable reflection of how they would run. I could try to set up the VM to have the same specs as my laptop.

[cortman]

I've tried all three. For a more standard desktop experience, go with Lubuntu.
I would really like to like Bodhi, as it's lightweight and highly configurable, but I never liked any of the E17 themes I got. If someone would give E17 some love and come out with a smooth, clean, sophisticated theme for it (rather than severe gradients, almost non-existent anti-aliased fonts, and '98-esque menus with a little extra gloss thrown on them) it could become really nice.
If you want to experiment a little and learn a new (but super fast) DE, I'd say go with Crunchbang. It's what I currently run on my netbook and I like it quite well.

[goldshirt9]

Unfortunately Bohdi will not work on my laptop , after loading I just get a black screen.
Not the first time i have tried with this distro :confused:

Lubuntu is becoming a excellent Distro. Crunchbang is a little too complex for me

[johnathansmith]

Using Crunchbang on my netbook(lenovo s100).

1. It's fast - desktop environment using almost no cpu.
2. Simple install (you can choose, lvm a crypt option, so it's safe when someone steal your ntb)
3. Debian sources list.

Only problem that i have was with Wifi. Have to change drivers, and Wifi also didn't remember the password.

[lento_]

I've decided to try them all out!

I stuck Lubuntu on the laptop over the weekend, and am slowly finding my way around it. So far I quite like it, although I'm having problems getting it to connect to my (windows) desktop, and I'm getting the usual wifi problems (I don't blame Lubuntu, I've never got it to work under various distros).

A new version of Bodhi is coming out late in the summer, so I may try that out then. As for crunchbang.... I'm not sure when that will fit in. Probably in a VM at some point.

[zhogan85]

I've decided to try them all out!

A fine choice!

[lento_]

It's one of the best things about so many of the distros out there - they are so easy to install. I've never done a Windows install which hasn't taken ages had a whole load of annoying problems, but it takes less than an hour to download a linux disk image, burn it, install it, and have something up and running.

[LeGasp]

I have an older laptop (inspiron b130) and was using Ubuntu 10.04 until I upgraded to 11.10, and let's say I really didn't like the new Gnome environment and it was so much slower! So this thread's relevant to me. I tried Xubuntu and it's not as fast as I remember it being. But then I discovered Lubuntu and it's incredibly fast and very easy to use. I also tried Puppy Linux and I think that's worth trying; I'm a big fan of the JWM environment now. This thread makes me want to try Bodhi so I think that's next on my list...

[ufoasd]

In the beginning I was using Ubuntu 10.04 for a year without a pulse audio server, always updated and stable core composite with Compiz - True 3D-environment. Then I decided to try a light environment (with composite), and I chose a CrunchBang 10 Statler, use it now - with pleasure. Yesterday I started a live CD with bodbod 2.0.1 - and was shocked - the fastest Live CD from what I've seen before. I am an experienced user since 1996. In the beginning I used PackardBell P133 with 32 MB of RAM.

[kazuya]

Off these three depending on hardware's age I would likely prefer Lubuntu. Crunchbang is nice as well and likely slightly faster than the other two. Lubuntu with the lxde DE is just more ready to go and easy. It is also easy to add E17 (like Bodhi).
However, I would recommend Zorin OS lite over any of these three.
ZorinOS is essentially a better tweaked version of Ubuntu with a very light desktop environment.

If you desire to go for something even faster, but not as much hand holding, it is very hard to beat Bridge Linux (based on archlinux - but much easier form of arch)

[Elfy]

Closed