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| Main Screen |
I've already reviews
Sabayon 5.2 and
5.3 KDE, so I don't think it's necessary to repeat the history and roots of Sabayon. Suffice it to say that it's an easy-to-use binary variant of Gentoo that includes everything and the kitchen sink.
According to the Sabayon developers, Sabayon 5.4 brings to the table a new theme, many bugs fixed, and a couple changes in the included applications. Follow the jump to see how it fares. I tested this in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM allocated for the guest OS, as this is how much RAM my old computer had when I tested Sabayon 5.2 on it directly (i.e. from a live USB instead of from VirtualBox).
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| Boot Splash |
The boot and startup time are quite fast. As always, Sabayon's default boot option is to boot and play some obscure heavy metal rock music in the background; as always (aside from when I first tested Sabayon 5.0, which I did not formally review on this blog), I opted not to listen to it. Strangely, the panel never loaded when the rest of the desktop loaded; logging out and logging back in fixed this. The wallpaper appears to be the same as in Sabayon 5.2 and 5.3, but the theme seems to hark back to the glossy black theme in Sabayon 5.0.
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| Mozilla Firefox (Plasma crashed) |
As I stated earlier, Sabayon tends to include everything possible in the live CD. The games not only include the standard KDE games, but also a demo version of World of Goo. Awesome! Mozilla Firefox is included, as always, though it doesn't appear to be particularly well-integrated with the system theme; a quick spin on YouTube and some other sites showed that most proprietary codecs are included out-of-the-box, though playing YouTube caused Plasma to crash, which is bad. OpenOffice.org is included and is well-integrated theme-wise, though starting both Writer and Calc (to demonstrate tabbed windows) caused Plasma to crash
again. This is getting really bad.
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| OpenOffice.org + Tabbed Windows (Plasma crashed |
Amarok is dropped in favor of Clementine, the Qt 4 port of Amarok 1.4. Interestingly enough, this is the first KDE distribution in which I have not been able to find Konqueror
at all; Mozilla Firefox is the only web browser, and Dolphin is the only file manager. KDE purists probably aren't going to be too happy about that, and I'm a little surprised that they didn't leave Konqueror in considering all the other applications that are present.
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| Kickoff Menu and Clementine |
I also saw in the boot menu options for Sabayon Media Center and Sabayon Netbook Edition, so I restarted in the hopes of booting into Sabayon Media Center. Unfortunately, here I encountered yet another bug, as restarting Sabayon yielded a fatal error upon boot. I used VirtualBox to force-kill the OS and manually restarted it, which then allowed me to boot into Sabayon Media Center. Instead of using KDE, Sabayon Media Center uses XBMC (formerly "XBox Media Center"), which is a desktop environment that is purpose-built for media center usage. As there are no pictures and videos included in the home folder, I found little use for it as a live environment, though it could certainly be useful once installed; also, it's meant for large screens more than 10 feet away from the user, so using it on a 13" laptop doesn't make sense, though weirdly enough, there is a Sabayon Netbook Media Center Edition also in the boot menu. (I tried that as well, and it's just the regular Sabayon Media Center edition at a lower resolution to better fit a smaller screen.) XBMC seems quite slow, so I think it's meant for machines with more processing and display power.
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| Sabayon Media Center (XBMC) |
I then tried Sabayon Netbook Edition, fully expecting to boot into KDE's new Plasma Netbook Workspace. Instead, I got a regular Sabayon KDE environment at a lower resolution (so it'll fit netbook screens better). I fail to see how this will help, as Sabayon is still (relatively speaking) a resource hog. Color me a little disappointed and cheated.
I guess Sabayon 5.4 hasn't really changed much from version 5.3, which had many of the same bugs that I experienced today. I simultaneously love it for its vast collection of applications included out-of-the-box and hate it for its stability issues, which still haven't been resolved despite using the extremely stable KDE 4.5. I guess this is going to get a solid "meh" from me. (That said, don't be surprised to see me testing the next version of Sabayon when it comes out.)
