A few weeks after backing up my main desktop, I started looking around to find another distro to take the place of Korora Linux.

When I had Korora on my computer I was tri-booting between Windows 7, Korora and Linux Mint 14. The Korora installation was an LVM style installation (setting this up was the source of my main issues I had with Korora).

One of the presenters on the MintCast podcast was always talking about Sabayon and how good it was. I have never used a Gentoo based distro and after giving a Fedora-based distro a chance last year I thought I should give Sabayon a try. Then when my Linux Format magazine turned up, Sabayon was the featured distro on the disk and it was not the Gnome version (Bonus!).

I installed it right into the same LVM area as used by Korora and kept my Linux Mint partition untouched. This went very smoothly – it found the LVM partition easily.

I have to say first impressions were good. The CUPS and the printer driver installed easily (and it actually tells me my ink levels). It seemed to recognize my dual monitor setup immediately and all I had to do was un-mirror the screens.

I went looking to install my base applications – Skype, Thuderbird, Google Chrome, Redbook, password manager etc. I used it for about a week. All was good until I realized that Sabayon (and perhaps Gentoo) is not really as mainstream as I was used to.

There was no direct install package available on the Codeweavers website for Sabayon or Gentoo. I tried to follow the instructions for the generic install and it just was not happening. I bypassed this and continued to look for other software. There is a lot of software available and the thing I noticed most was I started to dislike Rigo. At first it seemed like a good fast package manager, but I realized as I started to look for something like “editor”, that I could not order my search or define the fields where it should look. To make matters worse I could not figure out what order that they were in because it was not alphabetical.

It is touted as the equivalent of a Google search but it is not. It is too minimalistic. It could be better by adding a few features. I have added Entropy as an alternative. I tend to look there first however I have found that depending on how I put the search term in it will sometimes not find items either. This is perhaps the most frustrating thing about Sabayon.