Thread: Sabayon

Sabayon a newcomer as far as distros go, but has quickly become one of the more popular distros around. Sabayon is based on Gentoo, moving away from the typical Debian/RedHat route. Gentoo is one of those distros that encourage you to totally customize it and build it for your hardware, streamlining it for the purpose you want to use it for. Sabayon howeve., moves away from the concept considerably. Sabayon is to Gentoo - a distro widely regarded as being difficult, what Vector Linux or Wolvix Cub is to Slackware, a distro that significantly eases the 'transition into the more difficult distros in Linux.

Sabayon is one of the few distros that aim to look good and actually manage to do it without being over the top - like Linux Mint or Vector Linux. The somewhat toned down eye candy is relaxing to look at, and Sabayon is an example of one of the more effective and modest implementations of KDE. Sabayon is in active development, and there are regular releases available. More importantly, Sabayon is one of the few gaming distros out there, and you can start playing a few decent Linux games seconds after installation. The current version is Sabayon 4.0, and is pretty up to date. Sabayon releases are tied in with the development timelines of both GNOME and KDE, but there are builds with alternative windows managers and desktop environments available. Every version of Sabayon has the XBMC media centre included, and most of the codecs are included in the build, which makes it less of a hassle for even new users.

If you have a great system, want a lot of eye candy, and are prepared to experiment with Linux Games, Sabayon is most certainly the distro for you.