CrunchBang rocks #!

I'm not a Linux power-user. Correction, I'm not Linux user.

Seriously, I spent a lot of time laughing at those Linux fanatics, and still do. It always seemed to me that the more one likes Linux the more s/he has bad social skills.
But one thing has to said - Linux is a better OS for developers, period. If you're building stuff, if your'e contributing code to open source projects, if you like your shell to be efficient - it's Linux, mate.

So I found myself knocking on Ubuntu's doors and working for a fairly long time on it, struggling with it the way only a Win-OS user can.
Yet, something really bothered me with Ubuntu. The way it tried to be user friendly and in that course fucked up the UX or the way it offered me so many advanced features which I didn't want or cared about.

I have an old Toshiba Tecra laptop. It served me through thick and thin, suffered my abuses and even overcame some nicely done floor-crashes. I call it "the gimp", and my "gimp" had 2 OS's installed on it when I decided that it is time to wipe it clean and install a single one which can perform nicely.
Ubuntu was obviously the first choice, but then I can across a nice resource which presented a new linux debian distribution called "CrunchBang", or as the natives call it "#!".
After little exploration I came to know that it was a very light-weight OS, which works nicely on old machines - I had to give it a go.

The installation went briefly and in a matter of minutes I had it in front of me.
The interface minimalism is what got me first. No more task-bars and shit, just a blank desktop with the system monitors on and a set of keyboard shortcuts. beautiful.
Everything went faster, from opening the web browser to utilizing git on the shell - if it was a comics strip, I would add "SWOOSH!" to every operation I've made. And guys, I'm talking about and old machine with 3G of RAM and 2 Cores CPU. Insulting shit in today's terms.
I also have to mention that Ubuntu didn't approve my 2 monitors settings, which kinda sealed it's fate for me. What? install a plugin for that? yeah, right...

Of course I had to tweak the OS (yet) again, installing JAVA 1.7 (com'on, why does it have to be so annoying?!), installing languages and stuff, you know. But once I've done doing that, I was faced with a swift OS. simple as that. The "start" menu accessibility, the way OpenBox works for this OS, Sublime Text flying like an eagle over it... just sweet.
Imagine how it would perform on a new machine...

So if you're looking for a cool Linux distribution for your old machine, or just a cleaner OS which performs like a devil on the 7th pit of hell - I recommend you give this one a go.

… and BTW -
I caught this very inspiring deck of slides from HubSpot describing their culture. It's interesting to see how companies are aligning themselves to fit the present time.