A faithful but ugly Puppy or a sexy but slow Crunchbang distro?

This is a followup to this post.

About 2 months ago, I successfully installed Crunchbang linux on my old kitchen laptop. Why? Puppy is mostly stable and reliable but its built-in power management is bare bones. It has a scant number of packages built for it. (To wit — getting sshd loaded is not trivial, as it should be) Its screensaver is as basic as they come.

I now that Ubuntu won’t install on this laptop, (and — shocking — it’s below their minimum for their support — something that surprises me) so I heard word about a new ubuntu-derived distro, Crunchbang, that might give me more of what is missing above.

After some installation problems (I had to format the hard disk as ext2 only, ext3 fails) I got CB loaded. And, yes, it is a very pretty UI, and I notice other things as well. The LED status lights on my Buffalo Wireless PCMCIA card now works. I have full access to the ubuntu package repos. I have a full-featured screensaver. I can “sudo apt-get install x” for sshd or whatever contents my heart. Everything is snapping together nicely, until…

I leave the laptop idle and move on to the richer elements in my life. After a couple hours, I hear the hard drive being accessed continually. I click the  mouse button, but the screen is slow to respond — taking a couple of minutes before responding to a mouse click to stop the screensaver. After a couple of days, the pattern became clear — the laptop is spending nearly all of it’s time, after bootup, paging memory. The Crunchbang forum had no corrective suggstions (nor apparent interest). The matter was settled when my wife said; “I don’t know what was on before, but put it back. This is useless.”

And so I have. I’m typing this blog post in Puppy right now.