Bunsenlabs was based on Crunchbang Linux and the look and feel has remained true to the very excellent design philosophy of Crunchbang (also known as #!). Bunsenlabs aims to be a lean operating system with innovative approaches to solving technical issues other Distr's simply ignore. Their forums are packed with useful advice and technical help. I often visit even when I am trying to fix a machine with Ubuntu or Manjaro as its operating system. I am a long time user of Bunsenlabs and used have used various releases . It is a great distribution with very dedicated and truly knowledgeable programmers, developers, and other personnel. It is not a production distro, you wouldnt use it, for example, in a critical role within a business. You can think of it as being a sort of experimental Debian with Openbox, but the Bunsenlabs developers design a lot of their own software for full compatibility, and spend time theming the apps to fit in nicely with everything else.
There is a lot right with the distro. It is extremely well documented and all the documentation has links to it within the menu system. They use jgmenu, which I like a lot, by the way as it is easy to configure and theme to your exact liking. On the downside there isnt a lot of support for switching from the Nvidia open source Nouveau drivers to Nvidia proprietary drivers. I must admit I am not as keen on the version called Boron, as I was about the other versions.
I found a big problem with using sound engineering software and sound sequencers, which I have not found with any other distribution or Bunsenlabs version, and, sadly, I have reverted to using Linux Mint with Openbox until the issue is sorted.
So to finish up, I would say that Bunsenlabs distro is unique, beautiful, with very dedicated and technically brilliant people behind it. You should try it if you want to experiment and improve your Linux knowledge and be part of a friendly community. Unfortunately the Boron release seems slightly over-engineered to the point where there are too many themes and the menu structures and setup files are too convoluted. It is getting more difficult to understand what the developers are doing and to fix it when it goes wrong.
Hopefully they will get back toward the simplicity and beauty of Crunchbang.
Lo instalé hace alrededor de un mes, La pega que le encuentro es el compositor, ralentiza mucho la máquina. El arrastre de ventanas es opdioso y, como no sé ingles, no sé cómo solucionar eso. También el compositor traba los videos de youtube, lo desactivo y va mejor. Así y todo los frames en youtube son lentos. Agradecería una mano con eso.
Tengo una PC ASUS de 2013 con procesador de 6 núcleos y 4 GB de memoria, sin placa de video adicional.
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I installed it about a month ago. The downside I find is the composer, it slows down the machine a lot. Dragging windows is obnoxious and, since I don't know English, I don't know how to fix that. The composer also blocks the YouTube videos, I deactivate it and it works better. Still, the frames on YouTube are slow. I would appreciate a hand with that.
I have a 2013 ASUS PC with a 6-core processor and 4 GB of memory, without an additional video card.
Used this for a long time on Asus EE pc903 and as a OS for parents machine. It is wonderful albeit the idea that usually when you want to customize something a editor opens. Like tint2 editor now in latest Boron is not perhaps the best when you are on 'what is Ubuntu even?' level but if you are looking into a favorite distro with no frills and dont get scared of editors opening then this is the thing.
I always comes back to this one. I guess old Crunchbang left it's impression on me. Though i was mesmerized by blackbox back in the late 90's already.
Been using BL on an old Acer Asipre laptop (4GB RAM, SSD, Intel Graphics) this machine is ver 10 years old now . I used BL - for over 2 years with no major problems. After I setup the config with launcers / icons on the bottom bar (I think it is tint) I was good to go - as I just have those and the keyboard shorcuts I don't need icons on the desktop (like I had with Xubuntu) .For this old hardware this distro is responsive as I'm able to do my web dev (Visual Studio code as the editor) without much bother. (side note - I don't use hibernate / suspend functions )
I found this disto because I wanted a light system for my old imac core2 duo 24. This computer is not upgraded and still have his "old" hard disk and 8G of memory.
The installation was easy and everything even wifi is functionnal.
After a few hours I found this distro very easy to use and very simple even if I am not a computer geek.
I installed it on my two other computers.
After a few days my wife has understood the way to use it (she is a nurse and not fond of computers). I do not ear any complain.........
very nice distro, not as flashy as ubuntu, but at the end it works perfectly....
Thank you !!!!
User of Linux since 1997, more inclined towards Debian or Arch than RedHat,
I salute the Bunsenlabs team for the work done.
The distribution is truly lightweight without sacrificing the user experience, quite the opposite.
It runs perfectly on my old 2006 Fujitsu Amilo!
Very nice finish, down to the details.
OpenBox is very well configured.
The ultimate lightweight distribution.
Well done!
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Utilisateur de Linux depuis 1997, plutôt Debian ou Arch que RedHat,
je salue l'équipe Bunsenlabs pour le travail effectué.
La distribution est vraiment légère sans sacrifier à l'expérience utilisateur, au contraire.
Elle fonctionne parfaitement sur mon vieux Fujitsu Amilo de 2006 !
Très belle finition, dans les détails.
OpenBox très bien paramétré.
La distribution légère ultime.
Bravo !
Installed BunsenLabs on old laptops since the Helium days and always loved the excellent Openbox configuration for it's looks and operation. Boron hits a new level of completeness with some nice touches despite the trimmed down underpinnings. Functionality wise, it feels similar to a simple DE like lxqt, so whilst minus conventional GUI, it's still easy enough to get going with the intuitive menu and guidance provided.
And, Boron runs on a 2007 Macbook (almost flawlessly) - most Linux distros won't even boot!
Whilst not the lightest distro, it's undemanding on older kit and performs well with the great hardware detection you'd expect from a Bookworm base.
BL Boron is fun and satisfying if wanting a no-nonsense system, but broad scope for customising and making it your own.
I just tried several 32 bit Linux distros to see which would load on an Itronix mini laptop featuring the Intel Core Solo U1400 6 watt processor and 512mb hardwired RAM (the PassMark score for the CPU is 130, which is literally about 100 to 300 times lower than many mainstream processors today).
Being somewhat familiar with the strengths and limitations of some of the more popular 32 bit Linux distro options out there (like MX Linux, antiX, and Puppy), I thought I'd survey the landscape for new distros to try in addition to the more well known options.
Every new option I tried on the install failed except one, that one being the January 24, 2024 Bunsen Labs release of Boron. Here's some bullet points on things I came away very impressed with about Boron:
-first and foremost, the Boron OpenBox desktop looks great, and it uses very little RAM. The desktop at idle only consumed about 170MB of RAM, and even when launching OpenOffice writer only about 250MB of RAM (of 480 total MB of RAM available) was consumed. I was very impressed by the super low RAM consumption, and the desktop looks great!
-I was very impressed with the install process. I was told by a script during the install that my CPU supported PAE and was asked if I wanted to install a kernel that supported PAE (of course, since I didn't need to page RAM beyond a 4GB limit I declined). There were other helpful guideposts along the way.
-I was very impressed with how great and usable everything was. There is a minimum of preinstalled apps, but then there are options to easily install more through Bunsen (LibreOffice) or APT (Strawberry Music Player, MuPDF). I was surprised at how well conceived everything is presented in the menus.
Bunsen Labs basically gave me back my hardware to use even though it's super old, and it will be easy to maintain and update the system going forward (and to add new apps as well).
Installing Boron was a huge success whereas every other new option I tried failed. It goes without saying that I'm going to keep Boron on the system going forward.
Installation of the latest Bookworm-based boron was as smooth as silk, and its Openbox WM works right out of the box without too much extra configuration. Nice selection of some decent wallpapers, though mostly similar to those of Beryllium. Was still able to use Synaptic for adding extra .deb pkgs, so that's another plus.
All-in-all, boron is nicely-trimmed down Openbox spin of its Debian parent distro, with ability to use Tint2's kbd combo to run applets blazingly fast compared to Debian's XFCE, LXDE, and even LXQt desktop environments!
I was pleasantly surprised by this release! Snappier than Beryllium so far and like always with a new twist, nice small selection of great wallpapers to choose from. BLOB don't appear to be buggy this time either because last time when I switched between the themes some of the apps still had the theme from the one I just switched back and forth from.
The only thing I disliked was that by default tint2 is placed to the left side and not at the top, that is a total no, no.. remember your roots! Therefore I'll give it a 9 instead of a 10. ;)
This one is not for the faint-hearted. But if you've got some knowledge of Linux, this is the most productive Linux distribution ever.
Stable, because it's based on Debian. Blazingly fast because of the low-resource desktop environment and the well thought out structure by the dev team. Comfortable, because you know there is a dedicated dev team which will allways help you out in a very friendly manner.
I have been using Bunsenlabs (and it's predecessor Crunchbang) for almost two decades now and have never been disappointed.
I am kind of a distrohopper over all my years with linux. Since 2006 I tried a lot of distros and each one has its cons and pros.
But now I have to say that BunsenLabs Beryllium in my case gets me really fascinated.
It is the first of all distros that recognized my printer (brother) and works with it like plug-and-play.
The other fact is that Bunsenlabs runs pretty fast on my old laptop from 2014 - and I mean really fast.....
And it may be a bit speciell, but I realy like its design!!!!
Thanks a lot for your work and for having absolut no problems with BunsenLabs.
Lean and mean! After installing BunsenLabs' Beryllium with Openbox, I installed kde-plasma-desktop which is the lightest version of Plasma. Now I am running Plasma with Debian 11 with under 560mb RAM at boot. Previously, KDE Neon impressed with around 1.2gb RAM at boot. KDE Neon is a fine distro, but I really prefer Debian instead of Ubuntu. If BunsenLabs would consider upgrading to Debian 12.2 and trim a bit of the bloat, this would be the 10 out of 10 Linux distro that I've been seeking.
Time to install my favorite apps and upgrade LibreOffice. But, this is impressive. So far so good.
There are other Openbox offerings for sure, but not many with Debian. BunsenLabs is on the right path. Would BensonLabs consider a minimal Plasma spin of Beryllium in the future? I am sure they could pull it off better than what I can do.
I'm gonna start with the positive, hands down the best looking dark theme I've ever seen in a distro EVER, I believe it was made by sleekmason, the dev of "Lilidog", which is another Openbox distro. The negative is that there's things that could be seen as bloat, but I kinda refuse to do so, instead I view BL as something in the experimental realm, it is a nice mix of new and old when it comes to the now discontinue distro CrunchBang, which BL was born from.
And if you don't like the direction that BL has taken by modernizing the environment you could always go for "Crunchbangplusplus" (#!++), which is a distro similar to BL that is also continuing on the idea of what the original CrunchBang (#!) distro was, it is basically the same when it comes to the look and feel.
As I see it, we are lucky to have both BL and #!++ as an option, and I'm using both of them as a daily driver. BL on my PC and #!++ on my laptop.
Is it just me or was Hydrogen the best looking BunsenLabs release so far? Lithium I didn't really care for that green style, it was cool but not my style. As for Beryllium the dark theme is amazing and very polished, but it kind of ruins the fun when there's 7-8 other themes to choose from, which I also would consider bloat and just adds to the underperformance of the distro itself, also I don't seem to find a way to get rid of the themes that I don't need since I'm only using the dark theme, maybe you can.. maybe you can't.
For every release since Hydrogen they've just added and added stuff for the sake of adding stuff. What happened to BL? It used to be really fast and snappy. I hope they surprise me with the next release, which would be "Boron". Another important fact for new users to keep in mind is that BL is always late with their new releases, which is the main reason why I'm using another Openbox distro which is similar to BL.
Maybe most of this is nitpicking, but this is my honest opinion and a deal breaker for me, BL could and should be alot better, I mean their team is really good, but maybe the devs are busy with life in general, who knows really.
Very good when one comes to terms with it. As with directly Debian based distros, Ubuntu obviously excluded, the offer is overwhelming. But user interface isn't intuitive at all before one investigates the menus and finds out what is what and where is that. I might be too critical here, I am a hobbyist.
I'd like to praise the looks of the distro though. And it is not sluggish, I've got it on old HP laptop from previous decade.
For someone working in IT this would make a good tool. If that someone knew the ways with (GNU/)Linux distributions. And if the employer would not buy a Mac... After all BunsenLabs Linux has all that one needs, if not already in place then easily accessed with apt. A freelancer would save a pretty penny. But of course time would have be invested if one's not familiar with these.
I would wish that they had a centralized tool for configuring things. As a many years user of SuSE I was very spoiled by YAST, and now that YAST has been released under GPL, I think more distribution should simply start using YAST. Failing that, putting everything in one menu items would be a huge help, right now somethings are in the "System" menu item, but some things are not (e.g. network configuration) and some thing are in Preferences, e.g., Power Managment.
Kudos to them for also including Blackbox window manager integration, and that is important to me, although getting all the black box tools up and running did take some time.
It is fast and responsive in most apps, although the Firefox seems to lag quite noticeably.
There forums though are not accepting my email address. It is a .duck.com email address--it shouldn't be that unusual, and so that is why I downgraded it.
I prefer Crunchbangplusplus over BL, but BL would be my second choice out of all the other distros out there, but there's just too much going on with BL that is unnecessary, the Blob theme manager is buggish too, switched between two of the themes and some apps still had the color from the one I just switched from. No need for 10 themes, when you can ship a distro with only a light or a dark theme, the rest the users can figure out by themselves.
For me the true successor of CrunchBang is Crunchbangplusplus, not what BL has become, a true mad lab.
This may sound harsh, but it's about time that BL got its act together & come up with a release that is worthy of being called a successor to CrunchBang#!, which was my preferred distro for years.
On the surface, it is very good, with its auto-updating menu & general appearance; & the use of logical, sensible keyboard shortcuts that are a direct continuation of #!.
There is also the very good post-install 'bl-welcome' script that launches on first boot.
I made a fresh install on an old netbook that I use for data backup. 'bl-welcome' includes the option to install PAE support, which is great for old machines, & it is commendable to the Debian ecosphere that it continues to support what is still useable old hardware.
But there are several failings, or at least, oversights, with 1/2 a point deducted for each one, (from 9/10, because there is not a single 10/10 distro).
BL cannot be installed offline. There is no excuse for this. It is not a netinst distro.
Synaptic package manager does not come with either apt-xapian-index or software-properties-gtk included, which make synaptic very clumsy to use. Fortunately, I know what to do to remedy this problem, by installing them. A newcomer would not.
There is no firewall installed by default. UFW, which should be a standard, now has to be installed as an afterthought.
But perhaps the worst thing is that it cannot mount LUKS encrypted external drives, because liblockdev-crypto2 is not installed by default. This was mentioned in the BL forums 3 years ago, yet still it is not included as standard. This is not only laziness on the part of the developers, it is heinous.
So that's 2 whole negative points.
Furthermore, the BL website claims that their repositories can be added to other Debian based installations. But they cannot, because there is no wget for the signing key. Following the instructions, an .asc file can be downloaded from github, but there is no apparent way of installing it. dpkg does not recognise it. The only way to access the BL repositories is to install BL to hard drive.
By way of comparison, SparkyLinux repositories are easily added.
So, for the sake of a few MiB, if that, BL is severely lacking.
But at least it works, although I would not recommend it to newcomers to Linux.
lithium-3 ran perfectly. The speed was the major aspect to why I have used Bunsenlabs all the way back.
Crunchbang was wonderful, compact, fast, ran what you needed. Every version since has just bigger and slower.
This had now peaked at beryllium-1. Just holding a window and dragging the file manager round the screen flickers at a slow frame rate. Playing a youtube video the frame rate is unwatchable.
Something must be wrong that it can be that slow. Newer versions need to get faster again, otherwise it worth finding a smaller alternative.
It is actually not a Linux but DE. Architecture independent sets of scripts, themes and icons that could be installed over any Debian based distro. Even a developer had suggest to install it in that way. So I play with it a liitle on my armv7 Chromedook with Devuan-ceres installed. I did add link of berylliumt repo to apt sources list then update and install bunsen-conky metapackage. And i got a Bunsenlabs linux on armv7.
Pros: small ram footprint occupied by DE, easy customizable if you know bash..
Cons: user should have some expirience on scrpting; stability depends on used base so if you installed it on Ubuntu or Kali then do not blame developers for bugs. Unfortinally the source is down week or so.
Love it. Fast, simple. The new lithium version I tried has the feature that I was missing before, hit super key and type the first few letters of the app I want and hit enter, it starts. With this, I have a very very fast system. I made a portable version by installing to an SATA so I could try it out on a few computers without the USB. Dang fast. The color scheme is great. I like a nice flat desktop color that lets me see my windows, not a picture, it comes default that way. This is a no nonsense, get things done and quick type of distro.
There are features when you boot off the USB that will let it run in the RAM as a live mode. I have not tried that but that has to be way faster than my SATA at mb per second.
My other favorites are MX for the tools and easy use, and I like Debian for stability and I still like Gnome, even though it is a hog. If you like MX, and using terminal, keyboard, and want an uncluttered rocket fast system, portable or installed, give this Bunsenlabs a try. I am glad I did and came back to try it again.
If only Bunsenlabs was as brilliant as some of the other reviewers claim.
Firstly, it cannot be installed from running live.
Secondly, it cannot be installed without it being connected to the internet, but it cannot be connected to the internet from the installer. The only way around this is to reboot while connected, and go for the install option at reboot.
This all makes for an unsecured system that could be hacked by someone else on the same network while being installed. They could have all your login and password details, without you even knowing.
Furthermore, there is not even a firewall installed by default.
And then, there is the i386 version cannot be connected to the internet at all, other than wifi, and then cannot even be installed from live usb because it cannot find the cd-rom.
None of these factors were a problem in CrunchBang#!
So, with the exception to the general appearance of Bunsenlabs, there is no way that it can ever be claimed to be a continuation of CrunchBang#!
If Debian made an Openbox version, then this should be it.
Wait up, it is.
Phil Newborugh started a riff with CrunchBang, & BunsenLabs turned it into a great composition.
Everything works really well, and it is very well put together, with sensible keyboard shortcuts, which the BunsenLabs team have made even easier to edit.
My only con is that there isn't a light/minimal 64bit version, that doesn't have an office suite by default. I have to remove that after install, as well as other programmes. I would rather add components to a minimal system than remove excess.
Also, 'Swap-off' would be a good install option, as swapspace is not really necessary any more on a modern system.
Otherwise, BunsenLabs is the best Openbox fronted system available. All of the others are pastiches of CrunchBang.
If BunsenLabs upgrades to Debian 11, then I have no doubt that it will be even better.
Loved the graphical install. It got my Samung Chromebook 3 up-and-running where I was stuck on fdisk trying for arch. Quickly moved from the openbox wm to awesome. It is a flavour of debian buster so you can refer to buster docs and not just bunsenlabs specific info. Good forums and community. I hop that an in-place upgrade to Bunsen Berylium/ Debian 11 is easy and available in Q2-2022. Good documentation and discoverability built into the menu. Sane defaults and beautiful ricing on the desktop. Oh, and it works great on the tiny SSD this chromebook has.
On a 15+ year old laptop from Dell and recently installed BunsenLabs 32-bit. It is a Dell Latitude D410. I've installed Openvpn client, Remmina, Firefox, Putty, FileZilla, etc. The machine performs better now than 15 years ago with Windows XP! I plan on replacing the hard PATA based hard drive with a PATA based SSD to squeeze even more performance out of it. Thanks to the BunsenLabs Team for covering the older 32-bit machines left by every other vendor. Using Debian as their base, it was a perfect lightweight choice. Many software available.
Very good ,i moved from mx-linux to this ,just to test it out.
It performs very well and looks great too.
It's hard to continue distro-hopping when you have an OS like this installed as it just works so well.
There's really no need to use anything else.
Well done to the guys responsible ,a great looking and stable OS.
BunsenLabs Linux Lithium-3 deserves an 11/10, for offering such an elegant solution.
Having been getting tired of the slowness of other 'lightweight' distros, I tested several live distros, and BL won the contest.
Pros:
It's based on Debian Stable.
It's a community project, rather than an ego-trip that may suddenly be abandoned.
It's not a rushed out project: there has been no sudden upgrade to Debian 11. The BL developers would rather take time to ensure the stability of the final release, & it shows. Think about how long it took to reach the first release.
The installation process is very easy, regardless of which approach is taken, from graphical to text to expert to automatic.
The post-installation script makes things even easier.
Configuration of everything is very easy. All the tools are there. If the menu seems cluttered, then edit it. Try that with an orthodox menu.
There are no orthodox menus to get in the way. Speaking of which, there are direct menu links to a multitude of online resources, which is actually more useful than a limited number of site-specific-browsers. Think of the possibilities.
Everything is made easier, by default, which not only makes it ideal for newcomers (who can learn a lot just by using BL), but also ideal for an advanced user who has greater priorities than endlessly tinkering with a system.
Cons:
There isn't a 'lite' version.
It cannot be installed without an internet connection, otherwise installation fails at checking the repositories. Then again, many distros cannot be installed offline.
There is not a rose-red theme. Lithium compounds burn with a rose-red flame ;-)
All-in-all:
BL is probably the most user-friendly distro I have ever tried.
Have tried probably 10-15 distros and I think Bunsen Lithium is the winner! This is a 15-year-old computer my son used in high school ... he's now 33 and left this in a corner in the basement years ago. Some are crowing about the "dark theme," but I couldn't care less about that; I need easy WiFi connectivity and immediate responsiveness, and I've finally found it! My only potential issue is NOT BunsenLabs' fault; this is a 32-bit machine and I can't find a browser I like better than Dillo that will run on 32-bit. Would love to find a browser that can load sites the way they're "supposed to" look, but it's a tough request of a 15-year-old computer. I did snag LibreOffice and, thanks to this very lightweight distro, clicks and keystrokes work immediately, which is something that has not happened with ANY other lightweight distro I've tried. Will keep this and probably add the same distro to this computer's "twin," my own laptop I stopped using due to the idiocy of Windows XP over a decade ago. For the record, I'm a 60-year-old Grandma who is only slightly tech-savvy, but learning quickly. Thanks for a great OS!
I love bunsenlabs for it's stability, clean looks, simplicity and speed. The default color scheme is beautiful. Everything looks crisp. On my older PC it boots like in 3 - 4 seconds. Thanks to developers for great work.
I'm glad this distro exists. It's fast, reliable, involving you to tune it a bit. I wouldnt advise it to a total beginner but once you have learnt some basic commands, not sure any debian can beat it.
Not sure it's the best choice for multimedia editing (jack integration could be improved but it's maybe on my side), i have another session for that.
I use it daily on a lenovo t430 (haswell i5, 16 gb ram), i still use helium for now because it's stable and reliable.
lithium-2.1-amd64.hybrid.iso
Connected to Sony Vaio VPCCA intel i3 2.10GHz with 8GB RAM via USB 2.0 port and a 16GB Philips USB stick.
Lithium dark theme
Booted quickly, desktop appearance good with clearly defined, sharp icons rather than the fuzzy icons found on eg Debian Xfce. Audio worked; wifi untested as I don't use it.
But had to fiddle with display selections, default was showing on laptop not external Lenovo monitor. Eventually worked out it was splitting the desktop space between the two screens and set to external monitor. That worked fine. But...
System info table on right of screen only showing 3/4; 1/4 at extreme right is cut off screen.
Resting memory was 681MB. That's more than e.g. Xubuntu which (live) on same machine was 536.4MB with only terminal running top and 510.8MB for Debian Xfce also running top in terminal (up to 764.2MB with Firefox loaded but no pages opened).
Looked nicely put together but it's a different desktop to learn and imo therefore another superfluous debian-derived distribution which didn't seem lighter on resources than Xubuntu or Debian Xfce.
I have a very old laptop from 2009 with Core 2 Duo P7450 processor and 4 GB non-upgradable RAM. I recently bought a cheap 120 GB SSD to repurpose this computer for online education. I eventullay digged for lightweight distros. Instead of major distros that aim to be lighter version of ubuntu i tried more lightweight distros. I tried lots of of distros probably more than 15. BunsenLabs are definitely one of my favorites.
If you want a distro with clean desktop and dark theme and support for debian repositories then it is great. I am focusing my job instead of trying to fix the OS. It is hell fast. I t consumes less than 500mb ram when void. If your pc has limited ram then this is a good alternative for low ram usage i guess.
however i only used this computer to do web tasks, such as watching videos and video conference etc. I also used libreoffice for educational purpose. Thanks for people who built this distro. It changed my computer experience in a god way. I definitely recommend this distro for minimalist and tech noob people.
Bunsenlabs was based on Crunchbang Linux and the look and feel has remained true to the very excellent design philosophy of Crunchbang (also known as #!). Bunsenlabs aims to be a lean operating system with innovative approaches to solving technical issues other Distr's simply ignore. Their forums are packed with useful advice and technical help. I often visit even when I am trying to fix a machine with Ubuntu or Manjaro as its operating system. I am a long time user of Bunsenlabs and used have used various releases . It is a great distribution with very dedicated and truly knowledgeable programmers, developers, and other personnel. It is not a production distro, you wouldnt use it, for example, in a critical role within a business. You can think of it as being a sort of experimental Debian with Openbox, but the Bunsenlabs developers design a lot of their own software for full compatibility, and spend time theming the apps to fit in nicely with everything else.
There is a lot right with the distro. It is extremely well documented and all the documentation has links to it within the menu system. They use jgmenu, which I like a lot, by the way as it is easy to configure and theme to your exact liking. On the downside there isnt a lot of support for switching from the Nvidia open source Nouveau drivers to Nvidia proprietary drivers. I must admit I am not as keen on the version called Boron, as I was about the other versions.
I found a big problem with using sound engineering software and sound sequencers, which I have not found with any other distribution or Bunsenlabs version, and, sadly, I have reverted to using Linux Mint with Openbox until the issue is sorted.
So to finish up, I would say that Bunsenlabs distro is unique, beautiful, with very dedicated and technically brilliant people behind it. You should try it if you want to experiment and improve your Linux knowledge and be part of a friendly community. Unfortunately the Boron release seems slightly over-engineered to the point where there are too many themes and the menu structures and setup files are too convoluted. It is getting more difficult to understand what the developers are doing and to fix it when it goes wrong.
Hopefully they will get back toward the simplicity and beauty of Crunchbang.
Lo instalé hace alrededor de un mes, La pega que le encuentro es el compositor, ralentiza mucho la máquina. El arrastre de ventanas es opdioso y, como no sé ingles, no sé cómo solucionar eso. También el compositor traba los videos de youtube, lo desactivo y va mejor. Así y todo los frames en youtube son lentos. Agradecería una mano con eso.
Tengo una PC ASUS de 2013 con procesador de 6 núcleos y 4 GB de memoria, sin placa de video adicional.
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I installed it about a month ago. The downside I find is the composer, it slows down the machine a lot. Dragging windows is obnoxious and, since I don't know English, I don't know how to fix that. The composer also blocks the YouTube videos, I deactivate it and it works better. Still, the frames on YouTube are slow. I would appreciate a hand with that.
I have a 2013 ASUS PC with a 6-core processor and 4 GB of memory, without an additional video card.
Used this for a long time on Asus EE pc903 and as a OS for parents machine. It is wonderful albeit the idea that usually when you want to customize something a editor opens. Like tint2 editor now in latest Boron is not perhaps the best when you are on 'what is Ubuntu even?' level but if you are looking into a favorite distro with no frills and dont get scared of editors opening then this is the thing.
I always comes back to this one. I guess old Crunchbang left it's impression on me. Though i was mesmerized by blackbox back in the late 90's already.
Been using BL on an old Acer Asipre laptop (4GB RAM, SSD, Intel Graphics) this machine is ver 10 years old now . I used BL - for over 2 years with no major problems. After I setup the config with launcers / icons on the bottom bar (I think it is tint) I was good to go - as I just have those and the keyboard shorcuts I don't need icons on the desktop (like I had with Xubuntu) .For this old hardware this distro is responsive as I'm able to do my web dev (Visual Studio code as the editor) without much bother. (side note - I don't use hibernate / suspend functions )
I found this disto because I wanted a light system for my old imac core2 duo 24. This computer is not upgraded and still have his "old" hard disk and 8G of memory.
The installation was easy and everything even wifi is functionnal.
After a few hours I found this distro very easy to use and very simple even if I am not a computer geek.
I installed it on my two other computers.
After a few days my wife has understood the way to use it (she is a nurse and not fond of computers). I do not ear any complain.........
very nice distro, not as flashy as ubuntu, but at the end it works perfectly....
Thank you !!!!
User of Linux since 1997, more inclined towards Debian or Arch than RedHat,
I salute the Bunsenlabs team for the work done.
The distribution is truly lightweight without sacrificing the user experience, quite the opposite.
It runs perfectly on my old 2006 Fujitsu Amilo!
Very nice finish, down to the details.
OpenBox is very well configured.
The ultimate lightweight distribution.
Well done!
----
Utilisateur de Linux depuis 1997, plutôt Debian ou Arch que RedHat,
je salue l'équipe Bunsenlabs pour le travail effectué.
La distribution est vraiment légère sans sacrifier à l'expérience utilisateur, au contraire.
Elle fonctionne parfaitement sur mon vieux Fujitsu Amilo de 2006 !
Très belle finition, dans les détails.
OpenBox très bien paramétré.
La distribution légère ultime.
Bravo !
Installed BunsenLabs on old laptops since the Helium days and always loved the excellent Openbox configuration for it's looks and operation. Boron hits a new level of completeness with some nice touches despite the trimmed down underpinnings. Functionality wise, it feels similar to a simple DE like lxqt, so whilst minus conventional GUI, it's still easy enough to get going with the intuitive menu and guidance provided.
And, Boron runs on a 2007 Macbook (almost flawlessly) - most Linux distros won't even boot!
Whilst not the lightest distro, it's undemanding on older kit and performs well with the great hardware detection you'd expect from a Bookworm base.
BL Boron is fun and satisfying if wanting a no-nonsense system, but broad scope for customising and making it your own.
I just tried several 32 bit Linux distros to see which would load on an Itronix mini laptop featuring the Intel Core Solo U1400 6 watt processor and 512mb hardwired RAM (the PassMark score for the CPU is 130, which is literally about 100 to 300 times lower than many mainstream processors today).
Being somewhat familiar with the strengths and limitations of some of the more popular 32 bit Linux distro options out there (like MX Linux, antiX, and Puppy), I thought I'd survey the landscape for new distros to try in addition to the more well known options.
Every new option I tried on the install failed except one, that one being the January 24, 2024 Bunsen Labs release of Boron. Here's some bullet points on things I came away very impressed with about Boron:
-first and foremost, the Boron OpenBox desktop looks great, and it uses very little RAM. The desktop at idle only consumed about 170MB of RAM, and even when launching OpenOffice writer only about 250MB of RAM (of 480 total MB of RAM available) was consumed. I was very impressed by the super low RAM consumption, and the desktop looks great!
-I was very impressed with the install process. I was told by a script during the install that my CPU supported PAE and was asked if I wanted to install a kernel that supported PAE (of course, since I didn't need to page RAM beyond a 4GB limit I declined). There were other helpful guideposts along the way.
-I was very impressed with how great and usable everything was. There is a minimum of preinstalled apps, but then there are options to easily install more through Bunsen (LibreOffice) or APT (Strawberry Music Player, MuPDF). I was surprised at how well conceived everything is presented in the menus.
Bunsen Labs basically gave me back my hardware to use even though it's super old, and it will be easy to maintain and update the system going forward (and to add new apps as well).
Installing Boron was a huge success whereas every other new option I tried failed. It goes without saying that I'm going to keep Boron on the system going forward.
Installation of the latest Bookworm-based boron was as smooth as silk, and its Openbox WM works right out of the box without too much extra configuration. Nice selection of some decent wallpapers, though mostly similar to those of Beryllium. Was still able to use Synaptic for adding extra .deb pkgs, so that's another plus.
All-in-all, boron is nicely-trimmed down Openbox spin of its Debian parent distro, with ability to use Tint2's kbd combo to run applets blazingly fast compared to Debian's XFCE, LXDE, and even LXQt desktop environments!
I was pleasantly surprised by this release! Snappier than Beryllium so far and like always with a new twist, nice small selection of great wallpapers to choose from. BLOB don't appear to be buggy this time either because last time when I switched between the themes some of the apps still had the theme from the one I just switched back and forth from.
The only thing I disliked was that by default tint2 is placed to the left side and not at the top, that is a total no, no.. remember your roots! Therefore I'll give it a 9 instead of a 10. ;)
This one is not for the faint-hearted. But if you've got some knowledge of Linux, this is the most productive Linux distribution ever.
Stable, because it's based on Debian. Blazingly fast because of the low-resource desktop environment and the well thought out structure by the dev team. Comfortable, because you know there is a dedicated dev team which will allways help you out in a very friendly manner.
I have been using Bunsenlabs (and it's predecessor Crunchbang) for almost two decades now and have never been disappointed.
I am kind of a distrohopper over all my years with linux. Since 2006 I tried a lot of distros and each one has its cons and pros.
But now I have to say that BunsenLabs Beryllium in my case gets me really fascinated.
It is the first of all distros that recognized my printer (brother) and works with it like plug-and-play.
The other fact is that Bunsenlabs runs pretty fast on my old laptop from 2014 - and I mean really fast.....
And it may be a bit speciell, but I realy like its design!!!!
Thanks a lot for your work and for having absolut no problems with BunsenLabs.
Lean and mean! After installing BunsenLabs' Beryllium with Openbox, I installed kde-plasma-desktop which is the lightest version of Plasma. Now I am running Plasma with Debian 11 with under 560mb RAM at boot. Previously, KDE Neon impressed with around 1.2gb RAM at boot. KDE Neon is a fine distro, but I really prefer Debian instead of Ubuntu. If BunsenLabs would consider upgrading to Debian 12.2 and trim a bit of the bloat, this would be the 10 out of 10 Linux distro that I've been seeking.
Time to install my favorite apps and upgrade LibreOffice. But, this is impressive. So far so good.
There are other Openbox offerings for sure, but not many with Debian. BunsenLabs is on the right path. Would BensonLabs consider a minimal Plasma spin of Beryllium in the future? I am sure they could pull it off better than what I can do.
I'm gonna start with the positive, hands down the best looking dark theme I've ever seen in a distro EVER, I believe it was made by sleekmason, the dev of "Lilidog", which is another Openbox distro. The negative is that there's things that could be seen as bloat, but I kinda refuse to do so, instead I view BL as something in the experimental realm, it is a nice mix of new and old when it comes to the now discontinue distro CrunchBang, which BL was born from.
And if you don't like the direction that BL has taken by modernizing the environment you could always go for "Crunchbangplusplus" (#!++), which is a distro similar to BL that is also continuing on the idea of what the original CrunchBang (#!) distro was, it is basically the same when it comes to the look and feel.
As I see it, we are lucky to have both BL and #!++ as an option, and I'm using both of them as a daily driver. BL on my PC and #!++ on my laptop.
Is it just me or was Hydrogen the best looking BunsenLabs release so far? Lithium I didn't really care for that green style, it was cool but not my style. As for Beryllium the dark theme is amazing and very polished, but it kind of ruins the fun when there's 7-8 other themes to choose from, which I also would consider bloat and just adds to the underperformance of the distro itself, also I don't seem to find a way to get rid of the themes that I don't need since I'm only using the dark theme, maybe you can.. maybe you can't.
For every release since Hydrogen they've just added and added stuff for the sake of adding stuff. What happened to BL? It used to be really fast and snappy. I hope they surprise me with the next release, which would be "Boron". Another important fact for new users to keep in mind is that BL is always late with their new releases, which is the main reason why I'm using another Openbox distro which is similar to BL.
Maybe most of this is nitpicking, but this is my honest opinion and a deal breaker for me, BL could and should be alot better, I mean their team is really good, but maybe the devs are busy with life in general, who knows really.
Very good when one comes to terms with it. As with directly Debian based distros, Ubuntu obviously excluded, the offer is overwhelming. But user interface isn't intuitive at all before one investigates the menus and finds out what is what and where is that. I might be too critical here, I am a hobbyist.
I'd like to praise the looks of the distro though. And it is not sluggish, I've got it on old HP laptop from previous decade.
For someone working in IT this would make a good tool. If that someone knew the ways with (GNU/)Linux distributions. And if the employer would not buy a Mac... After all BunsenLabs Linux has all that one needs, if not already in place then easily accessed with apt. A freelancer would save a pretty penny. But of course time would have be invested if one's not familiar with these.
I would wish that they had a centralized tool for configuring things. As a many years user of SuSE I was very spoiled by YAST, and now that YAST has been released under GPL, I think more distribution should simply start using YAST. Failing that, putting everything in one menu items would be a huge help, right now somethings are in the "System" menu item, but some things are not (e.g. network configuration) and some thing are in Preferences, e.g., Power Managment.
Kudos to them for also including Blackbox window manager integration, and that is important to me, although getting all the black box tools up and running did take some time.
It is fast and responsive in most apps, although the Firefox seems to lag quite noticeably.
There forums though are not accepting my email address. It is a .duck.com email address--it shouldn't be that unusual, and so that is why I downgraded it.
I prefer Crunchbangplusplus over BL, but BL would be my second choice out of all the other distros out there, but there's just too much going on with BL that is unnecessary, the Blob theme manager is buggish too, switched between two of the themes and some apps still had the color from the one I just switched from. No need for 10 themes, when you can ship a distro with only a light or a dark theme, the rest the users can figure out by themselves.
For me the true successor of CrunchBang is Crunchbangplusplus, not what BL has become, a true mad lab.
This may sound harsh, but it's about time that BL got its act together & come up with a release that is worthy of being called a successor to CrunchBang#!, which was my preferred distro for years.
On the surface, it is very good, with its auto-updating menu & general appearance; & the use of logical, sensible keyboard shortcuts that are a direct continuation of #!.
There is also the very good post-install 'bl-welcome' script that launches on first boot.
I made a fresh install on an old netbook that I use for data backup. 'bl-welcome' includes the option to install PAE support, which is great for old machines, & it is commendable to the Debian ecosphere that it continues to support what is still useable old hardware.
But there are several failings, or at least, oversights, with 1/2 a point deducted for each one, (from 9/10, because there is not a single 10/10 distro).
BL cannot be installed offline. There is no excuse for this. It is not a netinst distro.
Synaptic package manager does not come with either apt-xapian-index or software-properties-gtk included, which make synaptic very clumsy to use. Fortunately, I know what to do to remedy this problem, by installing them. A newcomer would not.
There is no firewall installed by default. UFW, which should be a standard, now has to be installed as an afterthought.
But perhaps the worst thing is that it cannot mount LUKS encrypted external drives, because liblockdev-crypto2 is not installed by default. This was mentioned in the BL forums 3 years ago, yet still it is not included as standard. This is not only laziness on the part of the developers, it is heinous.
So that's 2 whole negative points.
Furthermore, the BL website claims that their repositories can be added to other Debian based installations. But they cannot, because there is no wget for the signing key. Following the instructions, an .asc file can be downloaded from github, but there is no apparent way of installing it. dpkg does not recognise it. The only way to access the BL repositories is to install BL to hard drive.
By way of comparison, SparkyLinux repositories are easily added.
So, for the sake of a few MiB, if that, BL is severely lacking.
But at least it works, although I would not recommend it to newcomers to Linux.
lithium-3 ran perfectly. The speed was the major aspect to why I have used Bunsenlabs all the way back.
Crunchbang was wonderful, compact, fast, ran what you needed. Every version since has just bigger and slower.
This had now peaked at beryllium-1. Just holding a window and dragging the file manager round the screen flickers at a slow frame rate. Playing a youtube video the frame rate is unwatchable.
Something must be wrong that it can be that slow. Newer versions need to get faster again, otherwise it worth finding a smaller alternative.
It is actually not a Linux but DE. Architecture independent sets of scripts, themes and icons that could be installed over any Debian based distro. Even a developer had suggest to install it in that way. So I play with it a liitle on my armv7 Chromedook with Devuan-ceres installed. I did add link of berylliumt repo to apt sources list then update and install bunsen-conky metapackage. And i got a Bunsenlabs linux on armv7.
Pros: small ram footprint occupied by DE, easy customizable if you know bash..
Cons: user should have some expirience on scrpting; stability depends on used base so if you installed it on Ubuntu or Kali then do not blame developers for bugs. Unfortinally the source is down week or so.
Love it. Fast, simple. The new lithium version I tried has the feature that I was missing before, hit super key and type the first few letters of the app I want and hit enter, it starts. With this, I have a very very fast system. I made a portable version by installing to an SATA so I could try it out on a few computers without the USB. Dang fast. The color scheme is great. I like a nice flat desktop color that lets me see my windows, not a picture, it comes default that way. This is a no nonsense, get things done and quick type of distro.
There are features when you boot off the USB that will let it run in the RAM as a live mode. I have not tried that but that has to be way faster than my SATA at mb per second.
My other favorites are MX for the tools and easy use, and I like Debian for stability and I still like Gnome, even though it is a hog. If you like MX, and using terminal, keyboard, and want an uncluttered rocket fast system, portable or installed, give this Bunsenlabs a try. I am glad I did and came back to try it again.
If only Bunsenlabs was as brilliant as some of the other reviewers claim.
Firstly, it cannot be installed from running live.
Secondly, it cannot be installed without it being connected to the internet, but it cannot be connected to the internet from the installer. The only way around this is to reboot while connected, and go for the install option at reboot.
This all makes for an unsecured system that could be hacked by someone else on the same network while being installed. They could have all your login and password details, without you even knowing.
Furthermore, there is not even a firewall installed by default.
And then, there is the i386 version cannot be connected to the internet at all, other than wifi, and then cannot even be installed from live usb because it cannot find the cd-rom.
None of these factors were a problem in CrunchBang#!
So, with the exception to the general appearance of Bunsenlabs, there is no way that it can ever be claimed to be a continuation of CrunchBang#!
If Debian made an Openbox version, then this should be it.
Wait up, it is.
Phil Newborugh started a riff with CrunchBang, & BunsenLabs turned it into a great composition.
Everything works really well, and it is very well put together, with sensible keyboard shortcuts, which the BunsenLabs team have made even easier to edit.
My only con is that there isn't a light/minimal 64bit version, that doesn't have an office suite by default. I have to remove that after install, as well as other programmes. I would rather add components to a minimal system than remove excess.
Also, 'Swap-off' would be a good install option, as swapspace is not really necessary any more on a modern system.
Otherwise, BunsenLabs is the best Openbox fronted system available. All of the others are pastiches of CrunchBang.
If BunsenLabs upgrades to Debian 11, then I have no doubt that it will be even better.
Loved the graphical install. It got my Samung Chromebook 3 up-and-running where I was stuck on fdisk trying for arch. Quickly moved from the openbox wm to awesome. It is a flavour of debian buster so you can refer to buster docs and not just bunsenlabs specific info. Good forums and community. I hop that an in-place upgrade to Bunsen Berylium/ Debian 11 is easy and available in Q2-2022. Good documentation and discoverability built into the menu. Sane defaults and beautiful ricing on the desktop. Oh, and it works great on the tiny SSD this chromebook has.
On a 15+ year old laptop from Dell and recently installed BunsenLabs 32-bit. It is a Dell Latitude D410. I've installed Openvpn client, Remmina, Firefox, Putty, FileZilla, etc. The machine performs better now than 15 years ago with Windows XP! I plan on replacing the hard PATA based hard drive with a PATA based SSD to squeeze even more performance out of it. Thanks to the BunsenLabs Team for covering the older 32-bit machines left by every other vendor. Using Debian as their base, it was a perfect lightweight choice. Many software available.
Very good ,i moved from mx-linux to this ,just to test it out.
It performs very well and looks great too.
It's hard to continue distro-hopping when you have an OS like this installed as it just works so well.
There's really no need to use anything else.
Well done to the guys responsible ,a great looking and stable OS.
BunsenLabs Linux Lithium-3 deserves an 11/10, for offering such an elegant solution.
Having been getting tired of the slowness of other 'lightweight' distros, I tested several live distros, and BL won the contest.
Pros:
It's based on Debian Stable.
It's a community project, rather than an ego-trip that may suddenly be abandoned.
It's not a rushed out project: there has been no sudden upgrade to Debian 11. The BL developers would rather take time to ensure the stability of the final release, & it shows. Think about how long it took to reach the first release.
The installation process is very easy, regardless of which approach is taken, from graphical to text to expert to automatic.
The post-installation script makes things even easier.
Configuration of everything is very easy. All the tools are there. If the menu seems cluttered, then edit it. Try that with an orthodox menu.
There are no orthodox menus to get in the way. Speaking of which, there are direct menu links to a multitude of online resources, which is actually more useful than a limited number of site-specific-browsers. Think of the possibilities.
Everything is made easier, by default, which not only makes it ideal for newcomers (who can learn a lot just by using BL), but also ideal for an advanced user who has greater priorities than endlessly tinkering with a system.
Cons:
There isn't a 'lite' version.
It cannot be installed without an internet connection, otherwise installation fails at checking the repositories. Then again, many distros cannot be installed offline.
There is not a rose-red theme. Lithium compounds burn with a rose-red flame ;-)
All-in-all:
BL is probably the most user-friendly distro I have ever tried.
Have tried probably 10-15 distros and I think Bunsen Lithium is the winner! This is a 15-year-old computer my son used in high school ... he's now 33 and left this in a corner in the basement years ago. Some are crowing about the "dark theme," but I couldn't care less about that; I need easy WiFi connectivity and immediate responsiveness, and I've finally found it! My only potential issue is NOT BunsenLabs' fault; this is a 32-bit machine and I can't find a browser I like better than Dillo that will run on 32-bit. Would love to find a browser that can load sites the way they're "supposed to" look, but it's a tough request of a 15-year-old computer. I did snag LibreOffice and, thanks to this very lightweight distro, clicks and keystrokes work immediately, which is something that has not happened with ANY other lightweight distro I've tried. Will keep this and probably add the same distro to this computer's "twin," my own laptop I stopped using due to the idiocy of Windows XP over a decade ago. For the record, I'm a 60-year-old Grandma who is only slightly tech-savvy, but learning quickly. Thanks for a great OS!
I love bunsenlabs for it's stability, clean looks, simplicity and speed. The default color scheme is beautiful. Everything looks crisp. On my older PC it boots like in 3 - 4 seconds. Thanks to developers for great work.
I'm glad this distro exists. It's fast, reliable, involving you to tune it a bit. I wouldnt advise it to a total beginner but once you have learnt some basic commands, not sure any debian can beat it.
Not sure it's the best choice for multimedia editing (jack integration could be improved but it's maybe on my side), i have another session for that.
I use it daily on a lenovo t430 (haswell i5, 16 gb ram), i still use helium for now because it's stable and reliable.
lithium-2.1-amd64.hybrid.iso
Connected to Sony Vaio VPCCA intel i3 2.10GHz with 8GB RAM via USB 2.0 port and a 16GB Philips USB stick.
Lithium dark theme
Booted quickly, desktop appearance good with clearly defined, sharp icons rather than the fuzzy icons found on eg Debian Xfce. Audio worked; wifi untested as I don't use it.
But had to fiddle with display selections, default was showing on laptop not external Lenovo monitor. Eventually worked out it was splitting the desktop space between the two screens and set to external monitor. That worked fine. But...
System info table on right of screen only showing 3/4; 1/4 at extreme right is cut off screen.
Resting memory was 681MB. That's more than e.g. Xubuntu which (live) on same machine was 536.4MB with only terminal running top and 510.8MB for Debian Xfce also running top in terminal (up to 764.2MB with Firefox loaded but no pages opened).
Looked nicely put together but it's a different desktop to learn and imo therefore another superfluous debian-derived distribution which didn't seem lighter on resources than Xubuntu or Debian Xfce.
I have a very old laptop from 2009 with Core 2 Duo P7450 processor and 4 GB non-upgradable RAM. I recently bought a cheap 120 GB SSD to repurpose this computer for online education. I eventullay digged for lightweight distros. Instead of major distros that aim to be lighter version of ubuntu i tried more lightweight distros. I tried lots of of distros probably more than 15. BunsenLabs are definitely one of my favorites.
If you want a distro with clean desktop and dark theme and support for debian repositories then it is great. I am focusing my job instead of trying to fix the OS. It is hell fast. I t consumes less than 500mb ram when void. If your pc has limited ram then this is a good alternative for low ram usage i guess.
however i only used this computer to do web tasks, such as watching videos and video conference etc. I also used libreoffice for educational purpose. Thanks for people who built this distro. It changed my computer experience in a god way. I definitely recommend this distro for minimalist and tech noob people.
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