I can say only one thing: BooYAH!

This LiveCD without copying CD to ramdisk (IOW reading form the CD for everything), is considerably faster than the Debian Sid install on the same machine.

Firefox is BLAZING once in memory, page renders are nearly instant. None of this... oh yeah I gotta think about letting a page move while loading in background.

OpenOffice is BLAZING, literally no delay in formatting changes or spelling or others feature I used.

Eye Candy is really Nice. AIXGL + Beryl... compositing with Indirect GLX, rather than the "X" compositor. Faster Accelerated, smooth effects, near instant transparency while moving.

SabayonLinux is a Gentoo derivative, but many things are starting to appear in Debian Experimental... though they are borked right now. They can be fixed with a few edits and some softlink-ing.

I have to say GNOME and KDE are equal on this ground. The Beryl Setting Manager has SOOOOO much available it is not even funny. Much of the stuff we are missing in GNOME is there now. Much of the Stuff that is in KDE is over taken by Beryl. This pretty much evens the play field in the repect.

One thing about the GNOME team, if they wouldn't ave stripped eveything down to bare mins, Beryl and the indirectGLX accelration of the desktop would not have gotten as much work being done on it.

This set of software along with standards being done in the FreeDesktop are going to make for a mighty contender for "Ohhh, pretty!" crowd, but also make the "Dammint, I want it to do it, this way!" crowd on the same side of the coin. Kills two birds with one stone. In fact 3 birds with one stone, no changes needed to give "sane defaults" for GNOME or KDE! [edit] I goofed here, I was using the LiveDVD (only available in torrent form for download) to speak of the GNOME and KDE stuff. The Mini LiveCD doesn't have GNOME. But will still give you the touchy feely stuff available in GNOME.[/edit]

Grab the LiveCD miniCD of SabayonLinux v3.1 to give it a test drive.

The on caveat, it is a bit rough, as there is ONLY 700MB of space on the CD. Whihc means stuff some people require is not there. Or doesn't work with everything. For example: kopete though it works with ICQ, MSN, Y!... jabber it zombies trying to setup the "account" info. Nothing big, but a minor annoyance.

[edit] Also, get the stuff: [link|http://www.sabayonlinux.org|http://www.sabayonlinux.org] [/edit]