Review: SabayonLinux 3.3

SabayonLinux is one of the growing numbers of distributions that offer the total in-the-box experience. As per usual, Sabayon is a monster, weighing in at just over 3 gigs. From just booting the DVD, you can see straight away that effort has been spent in making everything look and feel

SabayonLinux is one of the growing numbers of distributions that offer the total in-the-box experience. As per usual, Sabayon is a monster, weighing in at just over 3 gigs.

From just booting the DVD, you can see straight away that effort has been spent in making everything look and feel shiny. You're given the choice to boot with music. Music! There are a lot of things bundled with this distribution and that does add to its weight a considerable amount. Booting straight from the media is not a quick task — to add some perspective, I managed to cook myself some (fresh) pasta and eat it while it booted — around 5-10 minutes.

You then hit the login screens and are given the choice over desktop effects. Sabayon ships with Beryl to give it that extra bit of shine and I can't disagree that it works well.

I can't recommend testing Sabayon in the live environment. Things are slow from having to load from media and there is obviously too much to store in RAM to cache everything effectively.