February 18th, 2015

CrunchBang: The Rest of the Story

Paul Harvey — he was a radio commentator in decades past, kids (check him out on Wikipedia) — used to end many of his radio broadcasts with, “. . . so now, you know the rest of the story.”

Here’s the rest of the story regarding successors, spins or forks of CrunchBang. The tech media is falling over itself reporting that the “successor” to CrunchBang is something called #!++ which, to many CrunchBang insiders, is nothing more than one — but not “the resurrection” — project based on CrunchBang. It’s a project that appears, in the opinion of many CrunchBang contributors, as one that is trying to capitalize on the name, now that it’s “available,” in a manner of speaking.

However, many long-time CrunchBang contributors and forum moderators (of which I am one) have banded together to form what is now being called Bunsen Labs — named after the Muppets’ top scientist Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, perhaps? — to preserve the spirit of the technological simplicity initiated by CrunchBang, and combine it with maintaining the spirit of openness and helpfulness that was the hallmark of the CrunchBang community.

Rather than rushing into producing something quick and ghoulishly capitalizing on attention given to a distro in demise — a distro that has meant so much to so many — Bunsen Labs is taking a more careful and thoughtful approach in refocusing the original intent of the original distro to make sure what the original lead developer started remains intact.

There will be a Birds of a Feather meetup at this week’s SCALE 13x regarding the plans that Bunsen Labs has for a successor distro to CrunchBang — again it’s one successor to the distro, and there will be more than one — however it bears repeating that this project has the support of many of the CrunchBang community regulars and leadership.

And that, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.