Saturday, July 21, 2012

Sabayon Linux 9: Impressive out of the box distro

I came to know of Sabayon from Distrowatch. And no experience of working with Gentoo and Gentoo-derived distros, I thought of trying Sabayon in my virtualbox. And I am really impressed with a slick and serious OS.

As the OS claims to provide out of the box applications, the distro is is slightly heavier in size. 32-bit KDE is 2.4 GB, Gnome 1.8 GB & XFCE, the lightest, 1.5 GB. You can download both 32-bit & 64-bit versions from Sabayon Download page. I booted them in virtualbox with 2 GB RAM allotted to each. The initial screen is similar, as shown below.

From Sabayon 9 Gnome KDE XFCE
Interface-wise, all of the three look no-nonsense interface, with the typical blue-black interface. Gnome is 3.2.1 & Linux kernel 3.4.0.

From Sabayon 9 Gnome KDE XFCE

From Sabayon 9 Gnome KDE XFCE

From Sabayon 9 Gnome KDE XFCE
Application-wise, almost all common apps that we require in a linux distro, are covered, except VLC being absent in Gnome & XFCE versions (present in KDE). Chromium, GIMP, Shotwell photo manager, Adobe Flash support, full LibreOffice suite, Basero, Cheese webcam booth, empathy, bit-torrent, movie player ... the list is really healthy. I really liked the marble view globe. App-wise I am not complaining. The Rigo application repository is rich as well.

CPU & RAM usage:
KDE:         7%        300MB
XFCE:       1%        140 MB
Gnome:    6%        180 MB

XFCE & Gnome are pretty light it seems.

I have put the screenshots of Sabayon at Picasa https://picasaweb.google.com/115526653443007105911/Sabayon9GnomeKDEXFCE?authuser=0&feat=directlink

In overall, I really liked Sabayon and will install the XFCE version in one of my computers. The interface is serious and looks like a fantastic distro meant for productivity.

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