Popular Distribution 'Crunchbang' (#!) Stops Development
It seems that the Debian based distribution's time has finally come. Crunchbang (#!) Linux has decided to end the project. The project's developer Philip Newborough writes:
I have decided to stop developing CrunchBang. This has not been an easy decision to make and I've been putting it off for months. It's hard to let go of something you love.He goes on to reason that:
I'm leaving it behind because I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, I don't believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian.With friends using this on their main machines, and as an old #! user myself with the distribution sitting on a couple of old laptops, I'm personally sad to see it go. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this announcement.
While it's been gradually declining in popularity it's still ranked 20th over the last 12 months, appearing higher than distros like Xubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, and a stack of others. I'd guess the decline is due to the 18-month gap since the most recent release.
The message to take from this is: Crunchbang was a fairly popular niche distro, and Distrowatch cannot be relied on for accurate historical rankings.