Sabayon Linux: Something for everyone

Having recently made the switch myself to Sabayon, initially 3.3 in 32 bit and then 3.4 in both 32 and 64 bit on my desktop from Debian and Ubuntu (shh, I dont admit that often) I can say with some certainty that Sabayon 3.4 especially in the x86_64 flavor is what one should expect from a more mature project. Not that I havent found one or two things that I had to tweak a bit because of personal tastes, but that was minor.

Out of the box in 86_64 flash works without any workarounds or tweaking, and upgrading firefox doesnt break it. The media codecs are in place and working, the nVidia drivers are initialized and compiz fusion can be defaulted to be turned on without anything other than click it during the initial reboot from install setup. By far the most out of the box 'complete' distro I have used bar none.

Overall I would say that this is really really close to being a newbie distro, the only thing holding me back from saying that would be package management, which falls back to its Gentoo roots for. Thats something I dont feel comfortable handing to a 'I know nothing' new linux user. Porthole (a synaptic like front end) makes this better, however to get it right you still have to have some knowledge of how the USE flags work.

I've been a loyal Gentoo guy for about five years now. For me, the 'packaging' system was its best feature. I always wanted a bleeding edge system, but i was crappy at compiling things myself, and portage did it for me. I wanted portage, but I didn't want to have to write my own xorg.conf file and a lot of other things associated with the distro. I wanted something that worked out of the box...but with portage.

The biggest recent mistake of Gentoo was to attempt to write their own graphical installer, which after three releases, still sucks ass...I can only assume that it sucks since I've never been able to successfully install a gentoo system using it. Sabayon made a wise move in using the tried and true Anaconda.

Sabayon on my new laptop is simply amazing. Compiz Fusion works without a hitch and at the right resolution, and I'm lucky enough to have a wifi card for which there is a native Linux driver, and everything else works---sound, card readers, you name it-- except the modem which requires proprietary kernel modules, but I'll never use that piece of crap, anyway.

I don't think I'll ever be able to recommend a gentoo-based distro to a newbie, but Sabayon is pretty much the perfect distro for me.