Distro Review: Sabayon 4.0

"This distro seems to contain almost every piece of software you could possibly think of, all installed by default! It's nice in some ways but bad in others. Having the likes of Picasa, Google Earth and Skype installed will please a lot of users but it takes up a lot of space. My 12gb system partition was already feeling the strain with 10gb of data. People call Ubuntu bloated but even after running it for over a year and installing a hell of a lot of addition software I'd only used about 3gb on my system disk. I quickly noticed that not only had KDE 4 been installed but also Gnome, XFCE, Openbox and Fluxbox. This is the default behaviour it seems, when in doubt install everything. I'd wrongly assumed choosing KDE 4 from the wizard would only install this desktop. Another reason for the large footprint and slow install could be the source-based nature of the distribution. I'm not 100% sure of this as I don't have a lot of experience with source-based distros but it seems possible.

"If you want a big selection of software by default then this is the distro for you I'd say, right down to things like Ardour. I found almost everything I could want was already installed and there's something to be said for that I suppose. There's also a package manager called Spritz which allows you to install binary packages rather than compiling everything, it's a lot faster but some would say not very efficient. It was very buggy for me and probably needs a bit more work."

Complete Story

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