BunsenLabs Reviews

tknomanzr · 2017-10-10 17:46:53

^ Agreed. It is like the review is shot from the lens of a dedicated Windows 10 user. To me, comparing Bunsenlabs to Windows 10 is like comparing apples to oranges. The design methodology and focus of each is completely different. I load up any distribution out there that is designed for consumption by the masses, and quickly find it boring. So for me, the magic isn't there in what he's looking for. To each is own, I suppose. As for me, I want a machine I can hack around on.

MALsPa · 2017-10-10 23:25:18

When I read Dedoimedo's reviews, I do so knowing that his preferences in distros run counter to my own. His reviews can still be quite informative, though.

In some reviews of BunsenLabs I've seen (like, in a few of them at https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?r … unsenlabs), folks don't seem to care much for all the pipemenus and so forth. For what it's worth, I feel the same way -- I'd prefer fewer pipemenus.

MsMattie · 2017-10-11 16:21:03

BunsenLabs will always be a niche, like he says, and if it is not that then there would be no real place for it. No need for it. Some of the same things that make it less intuitive and easy in one-hour of use also make it faster and more efficient over a longer term.

With that being said, The Dedoimedo seemed to have gotten out of the wrong side of the bed on the day he wrote the review...

Sector11 · 2017-10-11 19:35:37

I love this:

Worse, there's no button to relaunch the welcome wizard anywhere.

OH MY!!! - DUH!! Buttons buttons whose got the buttons!

This guy is a MAJOR JOKE!

And then Dedoimedo had the NERVE to conclude with this:

Conclusion
Debian base, kernel 3.X, a desktop and some apps. That's pretty much that.

See, right there you are wrong in your opening statement to your conclusion. BL comes OOTB with 2 desktops and very easy to add more ... I have 5 but have 10 with special names in case I want to add/remove them on ocassion. Centre click on the screen ... see the bottom two options? DUH!!!!!

Or did you mean "a Desktop Manager" - well you'd be wrong again, no desktop manager ... but there is a window manager: OpenBox; which you seem to be biased against. And it's the draw to this this distro.

This is true in 90% of the cases, and the distinguishing factor is tiny, if any.

I think you misunderstood tiny and lightweight. Does a distro have to install 50% of Debian's repos to satisfy you? Scheech already - do you even know what Synaptic is? or apt or apt-get and what they are used for?

BL comes with:
at least two CLI text editors - one GUI test editor,
a multimedia program to listen to music or watch videos,
lowriter to write 'documents'
a file manager
a web browser
blah blah

But I'd like to believe there should be more, so that I can feel like I'm not just repeating same old stuff over and over without any real benefit or unique advantage.

OMG! You really do want 50% of the Debian repos - and probabky KDE, GNOME and Xfce4 tossed in there as well. Would that make you happy?

BunsenLabs Deuterium gives us a lightweight setup, it truly is that, but on any moderately decent hardware, the advantage goes away, and in its place, you get the horrible ergonomics of Openbox, which is simply not suited for any reasonable, modern work.

Horse feathers! My computer is at 10 years old smokes along with BL quite nicely.

WELL EXCUSE ME HERE but this is just so much brown stuff coming out of the south end of a bull walking north:

you get the horrible ergonomics of Openbox, which is simply not suited for any reasonable, modern work.

OK I get it you don't like OpenBox ... but you want to know something: CrunchBang and BunsenLabs was build for people who DO LIKE Openbox and precisely for the opposite reason you state: Right click anywhere on the desktop (no need to move your pointer all the way down to the south-west corner of your screen) click on what you want and - and well look at that: it get's out of your face!

What's in italics is only your biased opinion. It is absolutely suitable for modern work. You want to know why? Because you can configure it anyway you want to make life easier for yourself.

Hardware support is mediocre, the installation process is quirky, it's very hard to customize the desktop, network support is average, and in the end, you need to invest energy to achieve something you get out of the box with any other desktop environment. There's really no justifiable reason for that. Perhaps Deuterium will appeal to a small base of users, who want the flexibility and simplicity of Openbox, but for the vast majority of people, it's a hassle.

Hardware supports for me was absolutely 100%, I have installed it 6 times on my AMD x3 64bit, 6GB RAM desktop computer and it went as smooth as any Debian install - because it used the Debian Installer.

I have installed on an old Benq P-IV laptop and it went on it smooth as silk and runs just fine with 2GB RAM.

It's NOT hard to customize the desktop at all - visit the forums monthly screenshot thread and you soon see how people do that almost on a daily basis. Just because YOU don't know how doesn't make is bad, hard or - and I'll quote you here "not suited for any reasonable, modern work"

So here I sit chuckling and wondering where is this guy coming from?

So much in fact that I gave up. There wasn't anything cardinally wrong with the distro. But it's like walking into a store, seeing something, and then you move on, because there was no magic. Something like 2/10. Well, maybe next time. Or perhaps a different desktop environment.
Cheers.

Well now it's my turn to rate your review:

Completeness: 2/10
Taking the time to learn about the distro to give a reasonable review: 0/10

Now, with that said: Can I interest you in Windows10?

Last edited by Sector11 (2017-10-11 19:38:29)

plemil · 2017-10-11 19:45:34

This ^
Sector you made my day.
I have not been logged in for a long time but now you made me laugh big time :-D

Sector11 · 2017-10-11 20:37:56

Ahhhh well, then - my critique of his review (in part) was a success ... wanted to pick the whole thing apart, but ... naaaaa not worth it.

Bearded_Blunder · 2017-10-11 20:54:04

Once you have bl tweaked to suit you (and the software you actually use installed and added to the menu) a fairly short process in my case since BL comes with most of what I need, it's a delight to use on old hardware.

My *newest* computer is 10 years old, the boxes I use bl on are all older, mostly retired by others because they struggled running XP or Win7. Must admit the oldest box struggles with bl too, but that struggled when I migrated it from NT4 to 2K and needs re purposing as a boat anchor or DOS games machine.

brontosaurusrex · 2017-10-11 21:05:58

I thought that was a bad bad review.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2017-10-12 05:56:39

^ *whispers* check the distrowatch "reader reviews", we do quite well there

zephyr · 2017-10-12 06:31:28

Read over the review a few times and just couldn't understand or really comprehend the intent behind Dedoimedo's very negative review regarding BunsenLabs.

BL isn't Linux Mint and there are many of us who are thankful for that.

Does BL have a "button" or need one? (humor)

cheers

z

Last edited by zephyr (2017-10-12 06:32:50)

johnraff · 2017-10-12 07:35:07

We do get a lot of good user reviews on Distrowatch - average 9.0 - but as @MALsPa pointed out, there are a few near the top all with similar complaints. (all from the same person?) Some of the "issues" are just misunderstandings, but some we might want to think about?

Date: 2017-10-03 wrote:

Had this notion that it somehow was similar to CrunchBang, other than being an openbox distro it is quite removed from that.
Resources with memory and CPU run high...
Very bloated and extremely heavy with unneeded apps...
Not a keeper for me, not a pipemenu person, and the over-use of BL apps are a turn off too.

Date: 2017-09-05 wrote:

"I understand" in the welcome-screen. Childish assumption of a persons abilities.
Lot's of pipe-menus...
High CPU usage and ram on login. This where I know it won't be installed on my PC. Question is why and whats running in the background to do that? Very bloated distribution.
Not a continuation of CrunchBang, perhaps an attempt to attach themselves to the legacy. Simply does not have the attributes and capabilities of CB.
Perhaps a rework of the BL obmenu and remove all the bl-apps would greatly enhance the way it functions.

Date: 2017-08-01 wrote:

There is a major difference between CrunchBang, or any other Openbox is that BL uses a lot more ram and haven't been able to isolate why, ran a few applications to see what the issue was and nothing out of the ordinary. Just uses way to much memory.
A lot of pipe-menus, a few is great but found myself stripping out most and just using the old CrunchBang menu instead.
After a couple of days realized I can just install CrunchBang and update wheezy to Devuan Jessie and be on my way with a really awesome Ob install. Now running about 150mb of memory at login, very nice.
Maybe something with the BL labeled applications and the way they are built into the distribution may cause the memory usage to run high.

Date: 2017-06-19 wrote:

Over done with pipe menus with no real reason or understanding why bloat for cosmetic reasons.
BL seems to drag a lot of uneeded applications to perhaps suit a few individuals who helped launch the distribution. More of a personal distribution rather than a distro designed for others to use.
Not a CrunchBang replacement, although they might have fabricated corenominals blessings
Maybe if they trimmed it back a bit (a lot) and did away with all those silly pipe menu's it would be much more attractive and have better ratings on DW.
Why does all the applications need bl- in front of it? That just adds to the bloat and adds more difficulty for a person to customize it, way over done.
Forum is a great place for conky information...

I'm selecting only the unfavourable comments here, because we should be honest about how new users see BunsenLabs. I think some of those comments are quite unfair and others are just misunderstandings. Some, however, we might want to think about?

the suggestions that BL is trying to get some kind of free ride from CrunchBang. (In fact it is quite literally based on #!, in that we started with the #! code base.)
Several people said BL used too much CPU and RAM, with suggestions that things are running in the background. I don't experience this at all, does anybody here find that?
"bloated" ... really, in what way, compared to what?
The bl-* apps are not understood. They are just aliases (in the Debian alternatives system) not real apps at all, and don't add more than a few kb of disk space, while giving users more flexibility, not less.
The pipemenus are often mentioned. (It's easy to remove them of course.) What is it that annoys people?

Anyway, I think all the dev team regard BL as a continuation of where #! might have gone, and as a reasonable substitution for it. Most reviewers seemed to recognize that of course, but this impression of heavy and bloated that some get does bother me a bit.

brontosaurusrex · 2017-10-12 07:44:27

The pipemenus are often mentioned. (It's easy to remove them of course.) What is it that annoys people?

It appears people in general are having trouble removing features (developers and users), perhaps make a list of what is to be removed, including 'unnecessary' text, menus, themes, pipemenus.

I see the same problem at job place where a composer/editor has a real trouble removing ugly text title from video.

Also brain seems to patch visual bloat to system usage bloat (I'am pretty certain my printer prints faster if I have a light wallpaper). For example visually first thing I'd remove is tint2 launcher icons, then perhaps almost everything from systray and so on.

Last edited by brontosaurusrex (2017-10-12 07:47:27)

johnraff · 2017-10-12 08:40:47

brontosaurusrex wrote:

What is it that annoys people?
...perhaps make a list of what is to be removed, including 'unnecessary' text, menus, themes, pipemenus.

That was my question, really - what is it that people find 'unnecessary'?

Also brain seems to patch visual bloat to system usage bloat

This must be true.

...first thing I'd remove is tint2 launcher icons...

Agreed, most people don't need them. They're there 1) to help completely new users and 2) more than that, just to give an example of how to make launchers. We thought (after discussing it here) they're so easy to remove they shouldn't annoy any more experienced users.
Dedoimedo would probably want them though.

brontosaurusrex · 2017-10-12 10:00:11

johnraff wrote:

Dedoimedo would probably want them though.

I wouldn't overthink that and making him more annoyed is a positive feature imho.

what is it that people find 'unnecessary'?

I'd say the composer must decide, you will not get consistent (if any) / reliable feedback on that.

Last edited by brontosaurusrex (2017-10-12 10:01:34)

zephyr · 2017-10-12 10:12:43

Can't please everyone, gonna have whiners and complainers which never assess their lack of skills as the main culprit.

The review in my opinion was nothing more than a sham, Dedoimedo mind was set before the review even started. Dislike for Openbox evident and even suggest replacing it with a DE.

Wouldn't spend too much time worrying about the disgruntled, no matter what you do won't be enough.

Liked BL from the beginning, wouldn't change a thing!

cheers

z

MALsPa · 2017-10-12 12:35:32

johnraff wrote:

[*]The bl-* apps are not understood. They are just aliases (in the Debian alternatives system) not real apps at all, and don't add more than a few kb of disk space, while giving users more flexibility, not less.[/*]
[*]The pipemenus are often mentioned. (It's easy to remove them of course.) What is it that annoys people?[/*]

I think some of us would like something a little closer to default Debian + Openbox, and so less of the pipe menus and BL aliases, that sort of thing. But maybe that's just a handful of BunsenLabs users; I think most BL users would not feel that way. Lol, I wonder if it would be possible to have an option to log into a default Openbox desktop (nothing but the desktop and a short right-click menu!) like what you get when you install Openbox in Debian.

Bearded_Blunder · 2017-10-12 13:13:39

johnraff wrote:

Several people said BL used too much CPU and RAM, with suggestions that things are running in the background. I don't experience this at all, does anybody here find that?

Compared to #! yes.. but I could say the exact same of Jessie vs Waldorf (in their respective LXDE variants).. I put it down to the natural bloat software grows, plus the switch to systemd, on my *very old* hardware switching back mostly mitigates it.. That and ditching useless stuff like clipit, what's it for anyway? I mean in practical terms.. I know what it claims to be for.. I've NEVER used it, or its brethren on any version of Linux, or it's spiritual brothers on Windows... The native clipboard functionality is enough for me.

The issue is the underlying Debian, the changes in Waldorf > > Jessie not the changes between #! and H2.

MALsPa wrote:

I wonder if it would be possible to have an option to log into a default Openbox desktop (nothing but the desktop and a short right-click menu!) like what you get when you install Openbox in Debian.

Creating a user who does that is trivial, add them, then touch /home/$newuser/.config/bunsen before logging in (or after if you login from a tty), it doesn't get populated till first login, a script triggered from lightdm, commenting that out until you've manually created the marker bl-user-setup script sets would also do the trick.

Last edited by Bearded_Blunder (2017-10-12 13:17:46)

ohnonot · 2017-10-12 15:07:45

@johnraff:
so many quotes i can't even quote back.
one really annoyed me: the claim of being the successor of #! is unjustified.
but i always found the subtitle "community continuation of crunchbang" is 100% spot on an exact description of what bunsenlabs is!
anyhow, what makes people think crunchbang was so special?
maybe it was the first distro (at least after ubuntu niced linux up for the desktop) that went "minimal"?
i see a lot of (what i think of as) ex-ubuntu-users, who think they reached minimalist nerd nirvana because they use manjaro with i3.
ok i think i'm just babbling now...

PS:

earlybird wrote:

A fantasy animal: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eierlegende_Wollmilchsau.

the german equivalent of a shoehorn with teeth?

Sector11 · 2017-10-12 15:16:02

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

^ *whispers* check the distrowatch "reader reviews", we do quite well there

And this is why I made fun of his conclusion.

Sun For Miles · 2017-10-12 15:57:06

Bearded_Blunder wrote:

and ditching useless stuff like clipit, what's it for anyway? I mean in practical terms.. I know what it claims to be for.. I've NEVER used it, or its brethren on any version of Linux, or it's spiritual brothers on Windows... The native clipboard functionality is enough for me.

It's for people like myself. I consider Linux desktop 10x less ergonomic without clipboard manager software. The only thing I've changed in BL's Clipit is default keybind to "Alt+X".

#161 2017-10-10 17:46:53

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