Desktop Switching

I’ve been using Sabayon Linux for a little over two years now and have been pleased thus far with the overall look and feel of the system… But…

Well, let me give you a little back story. I started using Red Hat Linux back in 2000. It was a great learning experience at the time, but then they had to go corporate… Fast forward to 2003. I naturally made the transition to Fedora (like many others) and kept using that “Red Hat” style distro. I experimented with many other distros of course; Mandrake, Debian, Suse, Gentoo and Slackware to name a few.

While attending Linucon 2.0 back in ‘05, I had an interesting conversation with Eric Raymond regarding problems with the Fedora camp. The repos didn’t work for (what seemed like) a span of three months. He seemed quite frustrated with the lack of competence on the repo team and several other issues. (note: ESR officially left Fedora in 2007 because of these very problems). I was was quite frustrated as well.

Shortly after the con I started a new job in telecom, more specifically, in PBX building and installation. The tools of the trade were Linux and Asterisk. Very cool! My boss at that time was insistant that all the admins use Gentoo (for everything!). I didn’t have a problem with that so I quickly put it on my laptop.

I guess I’m going around the world just to say that I’m not happy with the new Sabayon package management system. They had to make it a little easier for the beginners to use the software and that meant that they stopped supporting portage “out of the box”. Yes, yes, I know you can set it up to use portage, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So, look forward to a new article detailing my return to Gentoo on my desktop!

Dorkily yours,

R