Playing with Sabayon 4.1

[questio verum]

In a fit of interminable boredom, I set aside my flawlessly functional, and all-but-bulletproof FC10 installation, wiped a spare drive and installed Sabayon 4.1. Did I mention I was bored? Anyway, I gotta say that 4.1 seems more well-behaved than all the previous iterations. Based on Sabayon LiteMCE, the .iso still requires a DVD, but the install takes up about half the disk space of 4.0 and earlier releases. This release includes XBMC Media Center by default -at least on the GNOME and XBMC-centric installations. XBMC is a slick open-source HTPC suite that is amazingly user-friendly. Conspicuously absent is KDE. A release with KDE is in the pipeline for later this month. I'm really trying hard to tolerate and learn Sabayon's package management systems. If I can do that, I may consider hardening and keeping it as my default OS. Er... at least until FC 11 is released.

Anyone else taken the time to jack around with this one?

qv

[elija]

I have played with 4.1 on a test machine but the full thing not the litre one.

I saw nothing that made me think about changing my main distro and my main impression was that if you think Ubuntu is bloated then it aint the distro for you.

[questio verum]

I have played with 4.1 on a test machine but the full thing not the litre one.

I saw nothing that made me think about changing my main distro and my main impression was that if you think Ubuntu is bloated then it aint the distro for you.

Agreed. Not one for older hardware. And not a popular distro with most coffee loungers, I know. But even with the bloat, it seemed much snappier than any of the mainstream distros I've used over the last year. Not sure why that would be, though optimizing for speed seems to be a trend among some distros recently. FC11, for instance, purports to have a 20-second boot time to a usable screen. C'est la vie. I don't mind the bloat, as my proc and other resources are vastly under-utilized most of the time anyway.

[alpha-X-geek]

I've resisted the urge to try Sabayon, mainly because I've been a Debian-based junkie since 2007, when I first properly joined the Linux club. I do see the appeal of Sabayon, though, with all those bleeding-edge apps and games installed by default.

[MikeTbob]

Sabayon is what brought me to Gentoo, which Sabayon is based on. I thought it was a really good distro and I'd recommend it more often but most people are turned off by the package management system. Good Luck with it and let us know how it goes.

[dsparil]

Sabayon 4.1 KDE is my main distro of choice. Since it is now based on MCE editions, the bloatware is now at an acceptable level.

I like this distro a lot since it has pretty much everything I need working out of the box. It comes with all my Codecs (including DVD), XBMC, Kdenlive, Kolourpaint, Firefox /w Java and Flash, and Compiz to manage my compositing with all the bells and whistles already turned on by default.

On top of that, if I wish to do so, I can take the advantage of Sabayon being Gentoo based and recompile the kernel and every package from source and speed up my computer by doing that.

Finally, Sabayon uses rolling releases, so I always have the latest version of the OS by merely updating my packages. The only reason I had to do a fresh install was for Ext4; otherwise, I wouldn't have had to do that.

I won't lie and say that Sabayon is for beginners, but if you feel that you've mastered Ubuntu and feel you want a distro that is more efficient at compiling packages, this is a distro worth looking at.