Sabayon 8.0 review - The love is gone

All right fellas! Ho studiato Linuxiano a la universita. Or whatever. Here we go, a review of Sabayon 8.0 with KDE desktop, a Gentoo-based Italian distribution, covering live session, installation and post-install use, including Wireless, look & feel, multimedia playback - MP3 and Flash, dual-boot setup with Windows 8, applications, package management, desktop effects, system performance, stability, suspend & resume, some annoyances, and more.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/sabayon-8.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

First time I tried Sabayon, the installer crashed... Every time I ran it. I tried to update it, and it failed to update. I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Fast forward a few years. Sabayon has come out with a version based on the Awesome WM. I've got a spare computer and I kind of like Awesome, so I figure what the heck, I'll try it...

It comes with Awesome, Chrome, and nothing else. I'm not kidding. No multimedia stuff, no office apps, no file manager of either the GUI or text variety, just the window manager and the browser; and somehow the ISO still manages to be over 600 MB.

At that point, I decided that Sabayon was for the birds.

BTW, I largely agree re the "sinusoid wave of quality" phenomenon. However, I think most of it is the fault of the desktop environments. In short: KDE 3 and Gnome 2 were functional, competitive desktop environments, even if they looked a tad bland. KDE 4 and Gnome 3 are shiny, bloated, sluggish, and annoying to work with. (Especially Gnome 3.)

IMO, the functionality per unit processing power that open source desktops offer has taken a nosedive over the last few years. I'm very glad to see new desktop environments emerging (Razor-Qt) and old ones being brought back to some semblance of life (Trinity, Mate). But I worry that things will never be the same as that time when you could use KDE on a 450 MHz Pentium III with 384 MB of RAM, and get all the functionality you needed from a modern desktop.

Technology advances. The things we do with the technology... don't. Sometimes it makes me wonder why we bother with technological advancements in the first place, at least in IT.

(Ugh, that turned out to be a long rant. Sorry.)