Gentoo vs. Sabayon

[Chymera]

what is your opinion?

[fuscia]

i've never used gentoo, but it's my unfair wild guess that sabayon is to gentoo what osx is to freebsd, or maybe what ubuntu is to debian.

[igknighted]

Originally Posted by fuscia i've never used gentoo, but it's my unfair wild guess that sabayon is to gentoo what osx is to freebsd, or maybe what ubuntu is to debian.

The BSD doesn't really hold as OSX really isn't BSD. Some of the userspace was indeed borrowed, but the kernel is a Mach microkernel.

The Debian/Ubuntu analogy is closer, but Sabayon and Gentoo are at the same time far more different than Ubuntu/Debian and also much more the same.

Sabayon uses the Gentoo (portage) repositories. So in that sense, with enough messing around you would be running pure Gentoo. This obviously isn't possible with Ubuntu/Debian, so in a certain sense Sabayon IS Gentoo (sort of a Mint/Ubuntu deal). However, at the same time, Sabayon has so much stuff not in Gentoo (entropy for example), and the difference in the philosophies of the two almost makes them FEEL more different than Debian/Ubuntu.

Overall, you cannot say which is better. Sabayon is certainly easier. Gentoo is certainly better for performance. I personally give the nod to Gentoo due to the buggyness of Sabayon, but both are very good.

[Chymera]

I approve of the fact that sabayon is easier... but what do you mean by performance when stating that gentoo is better for performance?

Are you hinting at the fact that it is a lot more lightweight, in terms of preinstalled apps, and thus has fewer processes hogging the resources?
Because if that is the case it's not a problem of performance but rather of how much stuff you actually want to have on your comp....

[igknighted]

Originally Posted by Chymera I approve of the fact that sabayon is easier... but what do you mean by performance when stating that gentoo is better for performance? Are you hinting at the fact that it is a lot more lightweight, in terms of preinstalled apps, and thus has fewer processes hogging the resources? Because if that is the case it's not a problem of performance but rather of how much stuff you actually want to have on your comp....

Nope, nothing to do with how many apps installed. It has everything to do with (1) Gentoo is compiled with optimizations specific for your system, while Sabayon cannot be (unless you recompile everything... which pretty much makes you running Gentoo), and (2) Sabayon has a lot of services enabled by default that are rather unnecessary for most users. Sure you could disable them all, but again, you might as well run true Gentoo if you want to go through that.

I'm not ripping Sabayon, I love the distro. It got me into Gentoo when I otherwise would not have tried it. But Sabayon gave me a taste of what Gentoo could be, and I moved on to the real thing. Try updating world on a Sabayon install. Sure, it can be done. But it is not easy. If you want to do that then you should run true Gentoo, its easier in the end. Plus if Sabayon has a package you want, just add their overlay.

[justin whitaker]

Sabayon is certainly easier to get up and running....but you end up emerging from Gentoo, and breaking things, and then you are back to the handbook and the mercy of the Gentoo Community Forums.

In other words, just run Gentoo.

[Chymera]

why do you end up braking things?

[mips]

Originally Posted by Chymera why do you end up braking things?

Probably because of the Sabayon overlays.

[rsambuca]

I have them both installed on my rig and prefer gentoo over Sabayon. Sabayon looks pretty slick, but is somewhat buggy on my pc.

I agree with igknighted here, in my eyes gentoo is all about customizing it for your rig, while Sabayon just installs everything. Just a preference of ease of installation vs customization.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Gentoo what can I say, its better then it was... no more two day installations, thank goodness for live CD's!
but I can say Sabayon is better, at least in its installer as Gentoos live leaves a lot to be desired.