Hi there to everyone.
In the last days I'm testing Sabayon Linux quite deeply to see how would
it be as a base for an eventual pro-audio-overlay-enhanced installable
live DVD.
I still didn't try to install pro-audio overlay, rt-sources and so on,
because I wanted to test it "from scratch".
Well, first of all the good aspects I found:
- Great default theme (very cool)
- Great default software selection
- Support for all the major Destop Environments
- Good "basic" Hardware detection (with exceptions, see below): this is
the first distribution I try that configures correctly my Echo-Digital
Mia, (which requires an external firmware, found in alsa-firmware),
without kernel rebuilds or manual configuration file editing, and
installs echomixer (even if I had to start it from command line ;)).
- Good performance for general desktop usage.
- Good Idea to keep an icon on the desktop ti get help via IRC (already
used in other distros).
- Great upgrade-recovery tool (you can update/recover your Sabayon Linux
when there's a new version directly from the LiveCD/DVD)
Now the problems I ran into and the aspects that IMHO need improvement
(for each one I filled a bug report on bugs.sabayon.org):
- VERY LONG boot time.
- Beryl was quite buggy with my video card. I had to switch back to kwm
more than once to complete even basic tasks because of white windows and
other similar problems, even after updating it to the latest version.
- Printer detection/CUPS configuration didn't work automatically
- After first boot, soundcard recognition started working randomly
(sometimes it's detected, sometimes no =_=)
- Too much wasted space on the desktop for resolutions <= 1024x768.
IMHO there's no reason to have a so big kicker+taskbar that never hides
on the bottom and another transparent bar with clock and other applets
on the top. I would use a single panel on the top, with an auto-hidable
kicker such as kooldock, ksmoothdock, etc
- A lot of little bugs that need to be fixed around applications
(firefox and thunderbird that don't respond well to mouse wheel, etc).
They're quite easy to fix for a Gentoo user, but not for a newbie (or
somebody who wants it working directly out of the box).
- Some minor usability issues (example: if I go to kcontrol -the first
configuration tool a newbie would see- to adjust window decorations,
nothing will happen. No window decoration change and no error message.
It is because the window decorator is Emerald, not kwm or Aquamarine, so
he should use beryl-manager to change it)
I had the impression their development team (I interacted with a pair of
them) was quite cold about my observations "from the noob perspective".
I felt the same from their community, when going into the IRC channel
and the forum ("It is the user that has to learn."; "Every distribution
has its own learning curve"; "You can tweak it by your own until it
suits your needs")
I suppose there could be 2 explanations:
1) The target of Sabayon Linux is the user who already knows Linux (a
"quite-power-user") and how to tweak general GUI aspects by his own
2) They don't know what is the target of their distribution
Conclusion:
I think this distribution could be usable (if there will not be too big
problems/conflicts with kernel and services) for HD-recording pourposes,
but it will need some major tweak in default desktop configuration and
usability in general.
It's cool, but could be improved :)
Anybody else have tried it? Impressions?
Greetz
Paolo