Keeping true to its Gentoo heritage, Sabayon 15.06 Gnome is incredibly fast, especially when compared with its more famous peers. While a Gentoo installation can sometimes last for many days depending on your hardware setup, Sabayon’s desire to provide a ready to use desktop out of the box, makes it ideal for those looking to work with a rolling-release distro with the less effort.
Sabayon provides a perfect blend of advanced features like source-based rolling releases with the ease of live installable medium with pre-packaged binaries. As well as minimal edition that’s light on graphical environment and uses an Openbox -powered desktop, the distro offers 64-bit images for Gnome, KDE, and XFCE variants.
User friendly
The distro wants to be used and is driven by a need to please users. Therefore, it features applications across categories like multimedia and internet and a vast collection of useful accessories. However, despite weighing in at 1.7GB, the Gnome edition doesn’t feature an office suite or even a word processor, and various other mainstream applications, e.g. VLC. Several applications, such as Videos and the Steam installer refuse to launch and the distro doesn’t even spit out a crash report or any errors.
The distro makes up for the missing applications with its impressive package manager, Rigo, although it looks nothing like Ubuntu Software Center or Synaptic, Rigo is a powerful app. It can be used to install updates, configure repositories (repos), in addition to searching and installing extra packages. It also serves as a bulletin board, informing you of community messages.
While Rigo connects to the Sabayon’s software repos that carry binary packages, you can also use Gentoo’s repos and install source packages on Sabayon using Portage. This unique feature gives users the choice to run a source- or binary-based distro.
The distro uses Anaconda installer, but unlike the recent releases of Fedora, Sabayon’s installer comes with buttons positioned in sensible places. The install appears to be a little slow, compared to other distros, and while the distro will automatically detect your time zone, it doesn’t let you choose what packages to install, as is the standard operating procedure for most distros. You can also use Gparted from the live system to carve space for the distro if you dislike Anaconda’s partitioner. On our test machines, the installation crashed when we chose LVM partitioning; however, there are no forum posts on the subject, suggesting it might be a rare abnormality and not a full-blown bug. The progress bar on the install also freezes once it gets to the halfway point even if the installation continues.
The distro does well to hide its Gnome credentials. The desktop features an Applications menu on the top-left of the screen and features a categorized list of included apps. You can click the ‘Activities Overview’ button at the bottom for the traditional Gnome 3 look. The distro also ships with support for NVidia and AMD GPU drivers along with Kernel 4.0, Kodi Media Center, Chrome, and various other internet and multimedia app with out of the box support for various open source and proprietary formats.
Sabayon is like Arch or Gentoo but with a far easier installation. The latest release looks as good as any modern distro even if it could have done with a bit more testing. We recommend this distro if you’re looking for a highly customizable but easy to install feature-rich distro.
Verdict
We give a total rating of 84/100 for Sabayon 15.06 GNOME OS. It is an excellent choice for users looking to move towards Gentoo but are wary of its learning curve. To download Sabayon 15.06, go here.
