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.

[ThinkBuntu]

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 :^)

[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.

[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 (http://download.zenwalk.org/people/jp/SNAPSHOT-24052007/) 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?

[thisllub]

At least it installs.
I have always had problems installing Gentoo.
Waking up the next morning (Gentoo takes at least that long to install) to a minimalist "installation failed" message.
I ran Sabayon for about 6 weeks and had no major complaints.
At the time Ubuntu had a nasty bug in Rdesktop that made it unusable for me.
I left it because I got the impression that every time I added a package the system got more broken.
After apt-get Portage is far too hard. It seems easier to me to compile things from source than create the build files necessary to use Portage.
Sabayon may increase the popularity of Gentoo just enough to save it.

[RAV TUX]

Well, I broke my Ubuntu install a few nights ago,...

My only question is why did you download the large Sabayon Linux DVD version if you did not want it?

You should have downloaded the Sabayon Linux Mini CD edition.

If you go Slackware based, I suggest Wolvix. (http://wolvix.org/)

[a12ctic]

Well, I didn't know there wouldn't be software selection choices.

[RAV TUX]

Well, I didn't know there wouldn't be software selection choices.Fair enough, next time start with the Sabayon Mini edition.

[forcesofhabit]

Yes! I tried installing Sabayon on my laptop and it was so slow. Same deal with my desktop PC as well.

[ThinkBuntu]

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.

[macogw]

My only question is why did you download the large Sabayon Linux DVD version if you did not want it?

You should have downloaded the Sabayon Linux Mini CD edition.

If you go Slackware based, I suggest Wolvix. (http://wolvix.org/)
Rav, they said they don't like KDE. Why are you asking that? You asked me that too. I told you: the mini just has KDE, and I hate KDE. You only get GNOME with the big one, so it has to be the big one.

Sabayon took 3 full minutes to boot for me, and it's really unresponsive. I just deleted it from my drive (only ever booted into it a few times, and not in months) yesterday and installed Debian. Much better.

[hanzomon4]

It's neat, if you want an easy in to Gentoo it's the best. It's slow to boot when compared to Ubuntu but beyond that I never noticed a difference in regards to speed. The first Sabayon install I did was a disaster, basically everything crashed and I was lost in kde. However the latest release is working just fine. I've grown to like, if not love, kde and portage is a great package manager. Portage is not apt-get, comparing the two is akin to comparing rocks to space aliens.

What pushed me to try it(Sabayon/portage) was the ports system in pc-bsd. I loved the ports system and Gentoo has always intrigued me. I can only say that Sabayon has been a great and totally different experience then Ubuntu. Both are truly worlds apart from each other and both are truly great at what they do. I'm sorry you had such a bad experience but them's the breaks I guess...

[joe.turion64x2]

Sabayon may increase the popularity of Gentoo just enough to save it.
I did not know Gentoo needed such publicity.

I used Sabayon 3.3 several weeks ago. It is most resource consuming Linux distro I have used (with a dual core system and 1GB of RAM!), it is also slow to boot and somewhat annoying to install but I liked the following points:
1.- It is useful to install it in offline systems: you won't likely need to install anything else!
2.- It is sort of a Linux demo distro: it shows you all available packages so you can pick those which work for you. I met several useful packages there which I now use in Fedora or Ubuntu.
3.- Its theme is cool (sounds included) and I love the KDE menu (although I mostly use GNOME, in fact I disliked GNOME's fashion there).

I stopped using it in my laptop because one day it refused to turn off the machine so I had to do it 'manually'. The next time I booted it I found lots of errors. Ubuntu 7.04 replaced it in the laptop, and recently PCLinuxOS 2007 did that in the desktop.

Joe.

[bvanaerde]

Yes! I tried installing Sabayon on my laptop and it was so slow. Same deal with my desktop PC as well.

I tried the LiveDVD, and it looked really great. Beryl was working out of the box. But after installing Sabayon, everything became really slow. 99% CPU all the time with a clean install.
So far my Sabayon impressions :) I was just curious anyway... Ubuntu is still my main OS.

[thisllub]

I did not know Gentoo needed such publicity.
.

The Gentoo developers have had some tough times lately. Distrowatch posted an article about the possibility of the place unravelling which would be a great pity.

The Gentoo forums are still more active than the Ubuntu ones.

I found Sabayon similar to SUSE in functionality but with worse package management..

There is still no 'perfect' distro but there are a few very good ones.

[guitarmaniac]

I too have had a bad experience with Sabayon.
First thing I've seemed to rival ubuntu as my favorite OS.
I got someone to download the mini edition for me (low download limit so I couldnt download it myself) and... no GNOME.
So I get him to download the full version for me and the damn thing wont boot.
Got it going on another computer and the speed was UNUSABLE (this coming from someone with the patience to use XP with 128MB of RAM back in the day).
For such a large distro the GNOME seems to be very lacking.
Had heaps of problems with it (for some reason gksudo wouldnt work, weird hey).
Anyway, that was enough for me.
Havent given up on Sabayon completely as it has a LOT of potential, just gonna wait for a few releases to pass before trying it again.

BTW Sabayon compile the packages on install does it. If so that kinda defeats the purpose of basing it on Gentoo for me.

[mips]

My experiences have been the opposite to the OPs.

BTW. I use the miniEdition cd install as the DVD has to much bloat for my linking.

[DJ Wings]

Zenwalk is a great system, but Wolvix is even better as a live CD.

[ThinkBuntu]

Zenwalk is a great system, but Wolvix is even better as a live CD.

ZenLive: The live version of Zenwalk 4.4.1 (http://zenlive.zenwalk.org/)

I've used their Live CD, and it's really great. A near-exact replica of what it's like to run Zenwalk when installed, except of course things go slower because they load from a disc.

[fuscia]

it's a lot faster to install the whole dvd than it is to add apps with emerge. "i'm installing this app now with the hope my grandchildren will make use of it."

[ThinkBuntu]

it's a lot faster to install the whole dvd than it is to add apps with emerge. "i'm installing this app now with the hope my grandchildren will make use of it."
Actually, by installing from the DVD, you're installing a bunch of binary packages. You would neither save nor lose time by emerging packages such as openoffice-bin via portage. However, if you want your apps built to your specifications and for your system (which will most likely result in a speed increase, and also allows more experienced users to customize the package before it's installed), then it'll take a while.

[fuscia]

i don't know what emerge did. i just found it slow as hell.

[FuturePilot]

I've found Sabayon's KDE to be a lot faster than Kubuntu. Although the boot time was maybe just a few seconds longer. Emerge was slow, but that's only because it's compiling everything from source. I thought that was pretty cool though. Seems like a powerful package manager. But the whole system kept freezing on me. Not going to fly.:(

[RaiSuli]

I installed the Sabayon 64bit dvd edition and am so far very pleased with it. The installation process couldn't have been smoother, Beryl and Nvidia drivers worked out of the box, it's fast and hasn't crashed on me yet. It will probably take me some time to get used to portage/emerge, but In didn't understand apt-get on the first day either. :)

[justin whitaker]

I have to agree that my experience with Sabayon is completely the opposite of the OP.

I have never managed to get Gentoo installed on my hardware successfully: I usually have issues with Xorg, the kernel, or 100 other things. Sabayon installs, usually within 30-45 minutes, and sets everything up perfectly.

Now, there is a ton of things installed, but it's pretty easy to remove what you don't want. None of the flexibility of Gentoo is lost, it just sets up alot of things by default so you do not have to. You can even change CFLAGs and recompile the whole thing if you want to...I don't know why you would do this, since it seemed pretty quick on my aged hardware.

The one area where I think Sabayon fails is on boot. Seems very slow, for some reason. After that, the distro seems to optimize itself over time somehow, because after the initial install it seems to get faster. Very odd.

So, why don't I use it? Apt seems like a better way to manage a system to me. While I like the theory of emerge and portage...in practice, it just takes too long, for little perceivable benefit compared to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is every bit as quick, unless you are running a really stripped and optimized Sabayon/Gentoo install.

[RAV TUX]

Zenwalk is a great system, but Wolvix is even better as a live CD.

Wolvix is even better installed.

[RAV TUX]

Rav, they said they don't like KDE. Why are you asking that? You asked me that too. I told you: the mini just has KDE, and I hate KDE. You only get GNOME with the big one, so it has to be the big one.

Sabayon took 3 full minutes to boot for me, and it's really unresponsive. I just deleted it from my drive (only ever booted into it a few times, and not in months) yesterday and installed Debian. Much better.

The mini also includes Fluxbox, Gnome and KDE aren't the only DE's out there.

[Nikron]

The mini also includes Fluxbox, Gnome and KDE aren't the only DE's out there.

I wasn't aware that Fluxbox was a DE. Also, if you really want optimized, go with one of the leaner distros, e.g. Arch, Zenwalk, Vector, Slack, Gentoo.

[RAV TUX]

I wasn't aware that Fluxbox was a DE. Also, if you really want optimized, go with one of the leaner distros, e.g. Arch, Zenwalk, Vector, Slack, Gentoo.
Fluxbox technically is an X window manager, which many people including myself like better then KDE or Gnome.

The best option for a leaner distro is Wolvix.

[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!

[macogw]

My only question is why did you download the large Sabayon Linux DVD version if you did not want it?

You should have downloaded the Sabayon Linux Mini CD edition.

If you go Slackware based, I suggest Wolvix. (http://wolvix.org/)

If I recall correctly, Mini Ed doesn't have GNOME. The DVD has GNOME and KDE and E17 and Flux and XFCE. That was why I had the DVD one installed.

Sabayon is the only Linux distro that can make Vista look fast.

[vexorian]

I do not think these forums are the right place to post feedback (negative or positive) about a distribution that's as unrelated to ubuntu as this one.

[macogw]

I do not think these forums are the right place to post feedback (negative or positive) about a distribution that's as unrelated to ubuntu as this one.

Oh hey this is in Cafe, isn't it? /me moves to Other OS Talk