I have been running Sabayon Linux (Xfce) for the past couple of months and figured I would throw a post up on here describing my experience with it.
Reasons for Running
The reason I tried Sabayon in the first place is because I was curious what it would be like to run a rolling release distribution (that is a distribution that you install once and just updates forever with no need to re-install). After doing some research I discovered a number of possible candidates but quick narrowed it down based on the following reasons:
- Linux Mint Debian Edition – this is an excellent distribution for many people but for whatever reason every time I update it on my hardware it breaks. Sadly this was not an option.
- Gentoo – I had previously been running Gentoo and while it is technically a rolling release I never bothered to update it because it just took too long to re-compile everything.
- Arch Linux – Sort of like Gentoo but with binary packages, I turned this one down because it still required a lot of configuration to get up and running.
- Sabayon Linux – based on Gentoo but with everything pre-compiled for you. Also takes the ‘just works’ approach by including all of the proprietary and closed source  codecs, drivers and programs you could possibly want.
Experience running Sabayon
Sabayon seems to take a change-little approach to packaging applications and the desktop environment. What do I mean by this? Simply that if you install the GNOME, KDE or Xfce versions you will get them how the developers intended – there are very few after-market modifications done by the Sabayon team. That’s not necessarily a bad thing however, because as updates are made upstream you will receive them very quickly thereafter.
This distribution does live up to its promise with the codecs and drivers. My normally troublesome hardware has given me absolutely zero issues running Sabayon which has been a very nice change compared to some other, more popular distributions (*cough* Linux Mint *cough*). My only problem with Sabayon stems from Entropy (their application installer) being very slow compared to some other such implementations (apt, yum, etc). This is especially apparent during the weekly system wide updates which can result in many, many package updates.
Final Thoughts
For anyone looking for a down to basics, Ubuntu-like (in terms of ease of install and use), rolling release distribution I would highly recommend Sabayon. For someone looking for something a bit more polished or extremely user friendly, perhaps you should look elsewhere. That’s not to say that Sabayon is hard to use, just that other distributions might specialize in user friendliness.
Try plain Debian. Linux Mint Debian Edition is the testing version of debian, with a bunch of cruft added to it and with a bizarre update policy that leaves users without security fixes sometimes.
Tyler,
Sabayon is based on Gentoo. Gentoo, as in the fastest penguin. Gentoo lets you custom compile software for your specific hardware. I don’t believe Sabayon changes this. I think Sabayon just makes it easier to install and drivers and such… So, what you are doing is not just downloading a precompiled package, you are downloading the source code and compiling it according to whatever local settings.
HTH
Sabayon provides both Entropy (the default package manager) which installs pre-compiled binaries as well as Portage the Gentoo package manager which lets you install and compile from source.