I totally agree with you on this, and with Corenomical's idea that perhaps the need for the Crunchbang distro had run its course. I understand how people like the differnt GUI tweaks provided by certain distros and why people wanted to continue Crunchbang.
Continuing with Crunchbang just seems like a lot of wasted effort to me. The effort could be better spent working within the Debian project itself.
I am not personally capable of making a crunchbang-like distro out of Debian, and I don't like any of the many other distros I've tried. Obviously self-described hackers don't need #! because they can build it. #!'s userbase is diverse. And some of the more capable users just like the settings and can spend their hacking hours elsewhere.
Depends on how they spend their effort. Couldn't most of the unique bits be delivered as additional packages to debian, installing all the extra bits? Then it wouldn't be very much "unnecessary" effort on the way to the system they want (no shipping of packages already available etc)
The reason why this is totally different from adblock is that this draws attention to what is fuzzed out, rather than just ignoring it completely as with adblock/hosts files... so when you see something fuzzed out, you are like "woah is that lucky charms or what?" (based on the fuzzed colors). With adblock/hosts you see nothing so you have nothing to focus your attention upon.
Don't get me wrong this sounds like a fun project though.
Exactly. I was disappointed that there was absolutely no attempt to look under the hood of this thing. That would actually be an interesting blog post to read: like a look at the system, pre-installed programs, the difference between it and PearOS, whether you can install whatever software you want on it, whether there is a package manager and, and then of course some wireshark captures.
I have to disagree with you on this point. I doubt Silk Road or people buying drugs online with bitcoins have affected the market for street drugs at all. Two completely different socio-economic markets.
Most who buy drugs in the inner city do not have access to bitcoin and/or Silk Road, and even if they did they would scoff at the inflated prices compared to the price on the streets.
Continuing with Crunchbang just seems like a lot of wasted effort to me. The effort could be better spent working within the Debian project itself.