Sabayon: Chasing me back towards Ubuntu.

[a12ctic]

Well, I broke my Ubuntu install a few nights ago, so I figured I'd give another distribution a chance, something I'd never used before. Taking a glance at Distrowatch I noticed "Sabayon Linux" I read the description and found it interesting. Taking the leap, I downloaded the ~4 gb iso file. I burned it to a DVD and booted it up. At first glance I was shocked, the live cd booted up with my nvidia drivers configured and AIGLX working. I thought to myself "Well, this is refreshing, I think I'll enjoy this." From here things took a critical turn for the worse.

Well I get to the desktop (KDE, not my favorite, but it works) and a bunch of useful apps seem to be installed, and a bunch of garbage I don't need is also present, oh well, I'll just not include it when I install it to the hard drive. I launch up gaim, firefox, and amarok, then start up the installer. From here, everything is going okay. Then the installer crashes for no reason. I figure okay, lets try again, this time I get to the install point and it freezes up again. Very touchy, also, it gave me no choice towards what packages I wanted installed or not. I start it up, and the last time it goes through, the installer is very VERY slow and freezes up frequently, but it did manage to finish installing. I finish up, tell everyone on my buddy list that I was talking to that I'll be right back and reboot.

Well, the reboot takes about 10 minutes, it says "Please wait, first boot" or something like that. Acceptable, I figured it was configuring something. I start up my desktop (I choose gnome instead of KDE). Upon starting gnome, I find out that my desktop is littered with several advertisements, a game demo, and a bunch of stuff I didn't really know anything about, I throw all that in the garbage bin, it sort of reminded me of Windows 98. I figure from here on it'll be fine. However, WRONG AGAIN, now I've noticed that it wasn't just the live cd being slow, but the whole distribution was incredibly slow. Firefox takes up to 3 minutes to start on the default install and gaim takes about 2!!! Completely outrageous. I think they installed every single app available for linux, and every module they could find! This thing loads up blue tooth support, touch pad support, everything, it gives you no choice what you want or need, it just installs it all.

When I read "Gentoo Based" I expected a tightly optimized distribution, I was greeted by the exact opposite. This is by far the slowest, most unprofessional distribution I have ever used, its pathetic. How a distribution like this could be number 6 on distrowatch is completely outrageous. So just a word of advice for you looking to try out this mess of a distribution, DONT BOTHER UNLESS: You want a thousand packages that you don't, and never will need installed, an incredibly slow desktop, a really ugly red theme, a bunch of advertising on your desktop, and everyone possible module installed possible. Right now I'm sitting around waiting for Ubuntu studio to finish downloading, I have very high hopes for this distribution, it's not going to take a lot to impress me coming from this.

[DJ Wings]

...The theme is l33t, and besides, it beats Ubuntu's brown scheme any day. Sabayon is supposed to be a tweakable distro for hobbyists and gamers, rather than a desktop system.

[a12ctic]

I'd say its the oposite of tweakable, if I want tweakable I'll install slackware... This more like "Install Every Package on the internt"

[DJ Wings]

Maybe I should reiterate why there are different Linux distros at all... Maybe there are people that need lots of software on one disc (like me), with a decent color scheme. Besides, it's Gentoo-based, of course it's tweakable.

[Kingsley]

I was wanting to try Sabayon some time in the future but the large DVD download put me off. If you aren't too traumatized and still want to try something different, I suggest PCLinuxOS. I've only been using it for a day but I can definitely notice the speed difference from Kubuntu. The default apps are very well-organized and it has great GUI tools.

[Achetar]

Get the miniEdition, much less software (it only has KDE and FluxBox though).
I was forced to because I have no DVD burner. Lucky me!

EDIT: I gave up on Sabayon. The boot times on my laptop are way to slow. If you want tweakable though, Arch is great!

[ThinkBuntu]

Originally Posted by a12ctic Well, I broke my Ubuntu install a few nights ago, so I figured I'd give another distribution a chance, something I'd never used before. Taking a glance at Distrowatch I noticed "Sabayon Linux" I read the description and found it interesting. Taking the leap, I downloaded the ~4 gb iso file. I burned it to a DVD and booted it up. At first glance I was shocked, the live cd booted up with my nvidia drivers configured and AIGLX working. I thought to myself "Well, this is refreshing, I think I'll enjoy this." From here things took a critical turn for the worse. Well I get to the desktop (KDE, not my favorite, but it works) and a bunch of useful apps seem to be installed, and a bunch of garbage I don't need is also present, oh well, I'll just not include it when I install it to the hard drive. I launch up gaim, firefox, and amarok, then start up the installer. From here, everything is going okay. Then the installer crashes for no reason. I figure okay, lets try again, this time I get to the install point and it freezes up again. Very touchy, also, it gave me no choice towards what packages I wanted installed or not. I start it up, and the last time it goes through, the installer is very VERY slow and freezes up frequently, but it did manage to finish installing. I finish up, tell everyone on my buddy list that I was talking to that I'll be right back and reboot. Well, the reboot takes about 10 minutes, it says "Please wait, first boot" or something like that. Acceptable, I figured it was configuring something. I start up my desktop (I choose gnome instead of KDE). Upon starting gnome, I find out that my desktop is littered with several advertisements, a game demo, and a bunch of stuff I didn't really know anything about, I throw all that in the garbage bin, it sort of reminded me of Windows 98. I figure from here on it'll be fine. However, WRONG AGAIN, now I've noticed that it wasn't just the live cd being slow, but the whole distribution was incredibly slow. Firefox takes up to 3 minutes to start on the default install and gaim takes about 2!!! Completely outrageous. I think they installed every single app available for linux, and every module they could find! This thing loads up blue tooth support, touch pad support, everything, it gives you no choice what you want or need, it just installs it all. When I read "Gentoo Based" I expected a tightly optimized distribution, I was greeted by the exact opposite. This is by far the slowest, most unprofessional distribution I have ever used, its pathetic. How a distribution like this could be number 6 on distrowatch is completely outrageous. So just a word of advice for you looking to try out this mess of a distribution, DONT BOTHER UNLESS: You want a thousand packages that you don't, and never will need installed, an incredibly slow desktop, a really ugly red theme, a bunch of advertising on your desktop, and everyone possible module installed possible. Right now I'm sitting around waiting for Ubuntu studio to finish downloading, I have very high hopes for this distribution, it's not going to take a lot to impress me coming from this.

* Ubuntu doesn't give you a choice for package installation either
* You should've used the Mini ISO if this is too much, then add what you need.
* In my experience with Sabayon, it sped up every time I used it, which was odd but good. After a few days of use, it was about as fast as Ubuntu
* I've had problems with burning my own Sabayon ISOs, which is why I own a Mini CD and the full DVD of 3.3, ordered from OSDisc. I actully got the Mini for free: The website didn't make it clear that it was a "mini" version, so I sent an email to the owner after accidentally ordering it, and he subtracted the entire cost from an order for the 3.3 DVD!
* With these ordered versions, my installs always went cleanly.
* 3.4 is going to be out sooner than you think, and will represent a big maturity step for Sabayon.
* I'm defending Sabayon because I'm Italian :^)

[ThinkBuntu]

And if speed is your concern, let me subtly recommend that you give Zenwalk a try when 4.6 is released. Or, if you're feeling saucy, give the release candidate a go. Using no preloaders whatsoever (and on decent but not great laptop hardware) it launched OpenOffice in one second on my computer consistently. I used Zenwalk for about two months, and was very pleased with everything about it except for package selection and laptop capabilities. If it weren't for the laptop struggles (suspend requiring a key combo and the root password, wifi slowing my system down badly with the Madwifi driver), I'd still be using it instead of openSuSE or anything else.

[a12ctic]

Yeah, I used Zenwalk 3.0 for about a year, its one of my favorite distributions. I guess I'll check out the latest release. The only reason why I stopped using it was because of the very very limited netpkg tool, but didn't they move over to slapt-get?

[ThinkBuntu]

Originally Posted by a12ctic Yeah, I used Zenwalk 3.0 for about a year, its one of my favorite distributions. I guess I'll check out the latest release. The only reason why I stopped using it was because of the very very limited netpkg tool, but didn't they move over to slapt-get?

Nope. They're improving Netpkg, and slowly there is an increase in the packages available.