Sabayon comes on a DVD which offers a live session, text installer, or graphical installer. Using the function keys, the language and keyboard can be set and there’s useful help to read. Various disks are available: KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. The installer is easy to use, adapted from Fedora’s Anaconda. Encryption is available if /home is on a separate partition. The text installer offers only replacement of an existing Linux or automatic partitioning of the whole disk.

I started with the Xfce version. The main programs are Midori, Pidgin, Xchat, LibreOffice, Exaile, Totem, and Gimp; there’s no email client. All ran from the CLI without any complaints, but the problems started when actually using them. Media codecs were provided but playback with Totem was very jerky. I installed Parole, which worked — only after I took the window and shook it! The GUI package manager is now Rigo: not the best, but a vast improvement on Sulphur. There was no tool to enable USB speakers, and the advice in the wiki didn’t work. Midori is still crashing, but I’ve discovered that’s caused by Adobe delivering a Flash incompatible with AMD processors.

To be fair to Sabayon, I decided to try the KDE version, which seems to be the flagship one. Although it idled at 310MB, this is a far more responsive KDE than in many other distros. The main programs were LibreOffice, Chromium, Kopete, Clementine, VLC, and XBMC. Again, there was no emailer, and this time no Gimp: not very impressive for a 2.5GB disk. Only Kopete raised warnings from Bash, but VLC only showed videos if I clicked on its window and held the mouse key down while I watched! And don’t try XBMC unless you have 2GB of memory and a fast processor, or everything will grind to a halt and you’ll have to reboot; that’s not Sabayon, just XBMC. I finally got videos to play by installing Dragon. KDE has a tool to select my USB sound card, but it didn’t work.

Sabayon looks good, the GUIs are well implemented, and the programs are stable: remarkably so for such a cutting-edge distro. The problem this time seems to be with media plugins: if you like Dragon, it’s fine. And there’s always something; over five versions, my rating for Sabayon has ranged from 4/10 to 7/10: not for users who want a quiet life.