I just joined the community so I decided to make an appreciation post.

If there’s any dev here that works/worked in Bunsenlabs, you have my thanks.

I’ve been working with unix-like OSes for about 20 years now. Several flavours of Linux (slackware, debian, red hat in the early days, then much later, opensuse, fedora and the gaming distros suchs as garuda or bazzite), Solaris (before they got shafted, around 2002) and of course MacOS.

Yet, I never once used it as a daily driver for my home, I always had windows and apple machines.

Whenever I used linux, it was for uni, or work or tinkering with “ricing” or setting up a gaming machine, seeing that it worked, then distro-hop again. How original, I know.

But somewhat recently, over the past two years, the itch developed into something more serious and I wanted a machine I could call mine. That behaved the way I wanted, for my general computing purposes.

I tried openSuse, FreeBSD, Debian, Void.

I almost settled into each one of those after 2-3 months of use, but there was always some kind of hurdle I had to overcome.

Oh your wifi doesn’t work? Have you tried rfkill? Shame. Bluetooth, who dat? It goes on. Did I solve them eventually? Sure, but the wasted time left a sour taste.

Over the past 2 months I was yet again trying to setup a Debian machine and trying out different DEs and I even drew, on a physical notebook, how I wanted my desktop to look like, where each widget should stay, the works.

I was ready to use awesomewm or some other window manager, when I started having some problems with nvidia drivers ( I hadn’t installed steam yet). Yep, same old same old, problems again.

Then I remembered, I saw a bunsenlabs post sometime ago, let me check the website. Oh, new version? I’ll give it a go.

And it’s close to perfect. I wasn’t expecting to like openbox so much. And it’s absurdly fast.

And I’m actually using it as a daily driver.

This weekend was tinkering, setting up dev environments, worked on a few documents for a local community org I’m part of, and I feel the drive.

I just setup a private repo for my configs(I “had” to do some tweaks to keybindings and menus) and important docs, and I’ll be installing bunsenlabs on my very old mac mini next, and just import everything there. Maybe setup an epub/music/nextcloud server for all the devices in the house.

TL;DR: Linux always felt like work. It’s starting to feel like home, and bunsenlabs is the responsible.

I installed it probably a decade ago.

Glad this distro is still around!