For this test, I used the Gnome version, which has wisely retained Gnome 2 for the time being. The live DVD came with a good selection of software, which was generally sound: a couple of programs generated warnings from bash, but only two fatal bugs were detected. One was solved in just 3 days and the other is being investigated. All codecs were installed and working.

The dependency-resolution problems I’d had with version 5.5 seem to have been sorted out, but Sulfur, the GUI package manager, is still very slow and rather confusing. Equo, the CLI tool, is much better.

My principal problem was that the network manager frequently set the address wrongly, until I gave up dhcp. This has happened with several distros (my router seems to trouble certain software), but the forum does have quite a few reports of problems with both wired and wireless networking.

If your network is trouble free, you can live with Sulfur (or be content with equo), and you like shiny new software, Sabayon is worth a trial.