sabayon stuff

Refreshing to see blog posts like this one from "Ixnay," who I guess is a key member of Sabayon's dev team: Equo rewrite, Sabayon 10 and Google

I don't understand half of what he wrote about, but at least he communicates with the users and let's us know what's going on.

Sabayon, a cutting-edge distro, really isn't my cup of tea, in a way. Sort of like how I couldn't see myself using only Fedora instead of something like Debian Stable (or something based on Stable), or even Ubuntu LTS. I like to have something that I'm pretty sure won't get borked by updates.

But Sabayon and Fedora are kinda fun to use, and interesting. Fortunately, I don't have to choose; I can play it safe and run a "stable" distro, but also live on the edge a bit with something like Sabayon.

Here's an excerpt from Ixnay's post, outlining some upcoming developments in Sabayon:

Before leaving for Dublin, we (as in the Sabayon team) are planning to release Sabayon 10. improved ZFS support, improved Entropy & Rigo experience (all the features users asked me about have been implemented!), out of the box KMS improvements, BFQ iosched as default scheduler (I am a big fan of Paolo Valente’s work) a load of new updates (from the Linux kernel to X.Org, from GNOME to KDE through MATE) and if we have time, more Gentoo-hardened features.

My biggest issue with Sabayon so far was a few weeks back when, while pulling in weekly updates, I kept getting a 'data not available on this mirror' message for just about every package that equo tried to pull from the first three repositories it tried. That really made the upgrade process agonizingly slow. It seemed to be the exact same situation that's described in this bug report from a few months back. At the end of that bug reports are notes from Fabio Erculiani noting that the mirrors were later updated or re-synchronized; I guess the same problem creeped up again, and was resolved again.

It might be interesting to see what improvements they have in store for Rigo, their GUI front-end for Entropy. I still don't use it for updating my system, though; I prefer to go to the command line:

# equo update
# equo upgrade --ask
# equo conf update

Sabayon 9 currently has KDE 4.9.00 and Chromium 21.0.1180.57 (148591). It's a rolling-release distro, so all I should have to do is keep up with the weekly updates and I'll be looking at Sabayon 10 sometime in October.

I've only been running Sabayon since late June, but I'm impressed by this distro, overall. Remains to be seen how I feel a couple of years down the road.