Distro testing marathon - Sabayon - days 2 & 3

Today is my last day of the distro testing marathon and also the last day with Sabayon. Below are my final conclusions regarding Sabayon and the whole distro testing marathon. Being a person, my opinions are subjective but I've tried to be impartial.

Sabayon - final thoughts

Yesterday a friend told me that I could use equo to sort the mirrors in order to get the faster ones. So I did and it was radically different, the whole installation process of packages went much faster compared to the previous day when I've updated the system in about 50 minutes (626 packages).

After the update something happened in KDE, at login instead of the usual sound there was just hissing and scrambled sounds. Oh, and I've managed to crash Plasma once! I was fiddling with KTorrent and after I've minimized it Plasma died on me but it restarted almost instantly.

A good thing about the Nvidia driver found in the repositories is that it had the 32bit-compat libs, something that missed on Fedora.

About the RAM consumed by the system and KDE after a cold start it's a fairly decent 530 MB.

Oh, the update notifier applet is still annoying. After the desktop loads it automatically checks for updates and it keeps popping-up for 3-4 times to tell me that the system is up to date. Same thing goes with the Nepomuk notification, it still pops-up randomly.

One last thing about the package management. The package installation process is very fast but in the same time CPU-consuming. Well, I guess that's the sacrifice for the speed, but still I don't know that this is a good thing when running on the battery of a laptop.

After these three days I can say that Gentoo is a viable distro, it's stable, fast, good-looking and loaded with fresh apps. Still, I don't know if it is a good choice for a laptop. Maybe it would need further testing to see what's the power consumption.

Final conclusions

Phew! Finally, the marathon has come to an end! It felt good to get a breath of fresh air testing the three distros and it also was a interesting experience which gave me a larger perspective on the Linux world.

If it would be to do a top of the distros I've tested it would look like this:

1. Fedora
2. Sabayon
3. LMDE

Why? Well, check the other posts I've wrote in my previous days and you'll get your answer hopefully.

I hope this will help you in a way or the other to get a glimpse on how these distro are and chose according to your needs!

http://web.info.uvt.ro/~andrasi.emeric