As with the last version, I tested the 32-bit Xfce disk.

There is a slight improvement: Totem is now working. Otherwise, my criticisms of version 7 still apply to version 8. Sulfur, the package manager, is still slow and badly designed. Searching only seems to work on actual names: e.g. “finance” doesn’t find Gnucash, even though it’s listed as a finance program. Midori still crashes: e.g. all the entries in the menu to access Sabayon help cause a crash. Various components of Xfce are still missing.

The developers state that their outstanding challenge is getting “bleeding edge and reliability to coexist”. Sorry chaps, you’ve failed. This does, of course, only apply to the Xfce version: the next reviewer was happy with KDE. But if you can’t get it right, why issue an Xfce version?

I have followed Sabayon now off and on since Sabayon 6.0 and they have only improved in their ability to make a stable function Gentoo based system. In Sabayon 6.0, I noticed that some drivers for wireless or display devices were not easily found and unless the user knew specific Gentoo (Portage) emerge commands, it proved to be a challenge to work with it starting off. However, they pretty much resolved this by their 7.0 release and now the 8.0 is a very stable system. Additionally, KDE 4.8 is defaulted to install as an initial update from the original iso you download (if by torrent) and as far as I have found, Sabayon is the only distro that has gotten KDE 4.8 right, with no bugs as of the time of this review. This is in comparison to others I have tried including openSUSE, Fedora, Chakra and Kubuntu.

I personally recommend this to anyone wanting a stable and potentially fast system, if you know what apps you need to accomplish this goal. New users can not expect immediate results or else frustration occurs as did it for the previous reviewer here.