CRUX

Reader supplied reviews for CRUX Average rating 8.2 from 6 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on CRUX? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 3.83.73.6.13.53.43.33.23.13.02.82.7.12.72.62.52.42.32.22.12.01.3.11.31.21.11.00.9.40.9.30.9.20.9.1 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 3.8 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-08-27 Votes: 0 It has a very low ram usage, plus it gives you the kernel to compile without installing anything, thats great. And its a source based distro, wich is better too, but i give it a 9 because Xorg was not working at least for me, but the distro is still really good, and the logo is cool too, but the repositories are not that much big, thats an issue too, but still a great distro, because is so simple to just do what the documentation says and works with no issues, just type the documentation and you can get a really minimal sistem. In general for minimal ram usage and low end usages. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-08-15 Votes: 2 TL;DR This is a GNU/Linux system with not much else, and that's exactly what I want from it. I've been using primarily Arch Linux since 2019. I've used Artix for a while to see what a non systemd Linux distro is like, but I was disappointed by what felt to me like a glaring lack of cohesion. I've installed Gentoo a few times, and while I do love Gentoo, I felt a little bit overwhelmed by the immense amount of micromanagement it allows for. I wanted to manually set and inset every available use flag, which was probably not a great idea. I also realised around that I find the filesystem on basically all Linux distros to be kind of messy, and I preferred the more structured approach of the various BSDs. In the back of my head I've always though, I'm going to switch to Gentoo for good, but I've never followed through for the above reasons. However, I've recently come across Crux, and to put it quite simply, it's exactly what I've been looking for; a very clean, minimal source based distro. In some ways I think it's simpler to use than Gentoo. Scratch that, in basically every way it's simpler to use than Gentoo, because everything is just generic GNU/Linux. No surprises. Now, that does mean it's quite finecky, but if I didn't want finecky I wouldn't be using a custom built desktop computer running Arch in the first place. The Pkgfile Syntax is very simple to understand, although I have yet to write one that just works first try, usually because I guess the name of a folder incorrectly, but still, it feels a fair deal more painless than Gentoo. The packages available in the ports, both official and 3rd party, leave a lot to be desired in terms of breadth of packages, so coming from Arch and having experience with Gentoo, it's a bit of getting used to, but it honestly doesn't feel to uncomfortable. I have my own ports folder for custom Pkgfiles so everything is installed through the package manager. I just need to copy and paste a few lines of commands into a Pkgfile and I'm installing all of the software I'm used to on Arch. It hasn't been a very long time since I first installed Crux, but unless something majorly changes, I think it's going to find a permanent home on one of my computers. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.7 Rating: 2 Date: 2023-08-02 Votes: 0 Slackware does everything CRUX does but much better. CRUX is bare-bones to the point of being almost completely useless. There is no task in CRUX that can't be done better in any other Linux system. If you really want something bare-bones and UNIX-like, Slackware is a much better experience. CRUX has no options built in for a desktop environment. If you want to use anything other than a standalone window manager like openbox or twm, your only option is to use a community-maintained repository. These are very hard to use and many of them are missing parts. I was *barely* able to cobble MATE together. It took hours and I had to install multiple dependencies manually from source because the port versions weren't recognized for some reason. Most packages had to be manually installed by force because of a footprint mismatch. Once MATE was finally ready, it barely worked. Most of the menus didn't work and many components were missing. Even if you don't want a desktop environment, installing basically any software is a horrible experience. Although the same could be said for Slackware, its SlackBuild system, while annoying to use, is at least functional. Plus, Slackware, in spite of its narrow repositories, has enough available in its default installation for most use cases. CRUX has basically nothing. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 6 reader reviews of CRUX...