I managed to find a lot of time over the weekend to play with the new Ubuntu 7.10 that was released on Thursday. It took a little bit of extra work to get the restricted drivers installed, and then to enable Compiz Fusion, but it was well worth it.
One anonymous commenter pointed out a Linux distribution called Sabayon Linux 3.4f that “just works.” I was skeptical at first with how good this might be, but I quickly became impressed. It includes the restricted/proprietary drivers out-of-the-box, and automatically enables Compiz Fusion for you if it’s supported by your graphics card! What’s even better is that all of this works on the Live DVD that they offer, so you can play with Compiz Fusion before you even install a thing.
Much like OpenSUSE this distribution includes the KDE Kickoff Menu which you can see in my screenshot above. I love this type of menu structure because it seems a lot more organized, and the search box located at the top makes finding your programs extremely easy.
One of the first things that you’ll probably notice on the Live DVD is the abundant amount of applications that are available for you to use. There are several advanced 3D games including TORCS, Battle for Wesnoth, Warsow, and FlightGear sitting on your desktop. I like a good game every now and then, but I don’t play them enough to make it worth installing. Luckily if you choose to setup Sabayon on your computer you can decide whether you want the games installed:
Sabayon also comes with an array of other applications, such as Picasa and Google Earth, that you won’t find built-in to other Linux distributions. This is pretty smart because it creates even less work for the user.
So how is this not perfect? There are still some graphics cards that it does not support, such as my laptop’s ATI Mobility Radeon X1400. When running Sabayon with the 3D graphics my Taskbars were un-clickable. I had no problem with my desktop’s graphics card, so your mileage may vary. There is a post in the Sabayon forum where users have specified whether their graphics card works or not.
As it stands right now I would say that this is my favorite Linux distribution because of how many things it is able to include out-of-the-box. I had the problem with my graphics card on my laptop, but things went so incredibly smooth on my desktop that it compensated for those issues. If they are able to extend their graphics card support a little more I would definitely say this is the best version of Linux available. Oh, and did I mention that it is extremely well updated?
The two things I’m not a huge fan about are the bright red theme and slightly disturbing sound scheme. Luckily these things can easily be changed. 
I actually use Sabayon myself. I was just as impressed as you about all the stuff that it comes with “out of the box”. I also really love the portage system, and how easy Kuroo makes it to use.
My graphics card can run compiz, but not well enough (it’s an old geforece 2); however, I did appreciate the fact that it gave me the chance of setting it up so easily from the get go.
The way the init scripts run is very organized, as well. I like that. It makes it so much easier to turn things on/off.
My biggest gripe, I guess (besides the ugly [IMO] color scheme) is the NetworkManager system. It barely works. I immediately reverted to the traditional Gentoo network script system (which was VERY easy) and was completely satisfied.
Pretty cool, I played around with Mandrive 2008 on Sunday (would have been sooner but all day Saturday the tracker seemed to be down). It is pretty cool, much better than the Mandrake that I used back in 2000 (of course I knew it would be). I was pleasantly surprised at it, and I even liked it. Linux distributions have shaped up much nicely it was like this 3 years ago (when I moved over from Fedora to Ubuntu which was back then a brand new distro that was same as Debian but with a brown theme).
Glad I’m not the only one that isn’t a big fan of the color scheme. And I was just starting to notice that the NetworkManager system isn’t all that great. I seem to be getting by with it though.
It is pretty crazy how far they have come, but I would like to see more of them start focusing on the smaller details. Instead of adding more new features they should look more to finetuning the existing ones. They should also try and find ways to add a GUI to more configuration options so that users barely have to open the terminal in order to get something done.
My Nvidia 6600GT card is listed as supported and being able to test out Compiz from the live DVD sounds great. I’ll definitely be trying this out. If all goes well I’ll try installing it into a separate partition so I can run it alongside Ubuntu until I decide which I prefer long term.
I’m still up in arms as to whether i prefer Ubuntu or Sabayon. Both have their strengths, with Ubuntu’s being an outstanding community. Sabayon is a bit ahead in terms of features and compatibility I think though.
Well, I must disagree with ‘just works’ – but greatly disagree. As a longtime GatesSlave I’ve been fiddling with a variety of Linux flavours to find a replacement that will at least run the basics BEFORE the steep learning curve to run other stuff.In fact, I even bought a laptop specifically for the experiment So far tried Ubuntu 7.10; Xandros 4; Debian 4; Open Suse 10.3; Fedora Core 6; PClinuxOS Freespire; Mandriva 2008 & Sabayon. I listed all the things that I felt an OS should perform ‘straight out of the box’ and then rated all my trials. Mandriva 2008 was my choice until I tried Sabayon . Now, I don’t know. The difference for me – remembering we are only talking about basic functions – is that
- Sabayon will play licensed DVDs (Mandriva won’t. but will play ‘cracked’ ones)
- Mandriva will allow me to use my headphones and mute button – Sabayon won’t.
So Sabayon is good, but doesn’t ‘just work’!
oops. That first line should read ‘but NOT greatly disagree’. Oh, and since I’m here – these are the ‘basics’ for me.
Essential
Touch Pad / Keyboard works
Play DVD movies
Write DVDs/CDs
Firefox 2 or later
Open Office and Spellchecker work
Decent PIM / Email
Decent File Manager
Programs to read *.eml *.pdf *.jpg
mp3 player
Headphone socket works
Nice
USB mouse/keyboard work
Mount USB Flash drives / External drives on desktop
Low battery warning
Plug and Play Printer
Plug and Play Scanner
Manual control for headphone socket works
As with any Linux distribution it really depends on what you’re trying to do and what hardware you’re using. Generally speaking though, I would say that Sabayon is one of the few Linux distributions that require little configuration out-of-the-box.