I have never tried Sabayon before but I have heard about it, I had the impression that it was a heavy 3D gaming distro, which never really interested me because I could just download those games under another distro anyway. I had a livecd of an older version I got from a linux magazine I bought randomly, it actually had Sabayon on one side of a dvd and linux mint on the other but never tried it.

I was relieved to see the usb drive booted correctly greeting me with a working gnome desktop. At one point of the installation an exception occurred, I couldn’t believe it, I tried reseting the installation process, being a developer and knowing how bugs may occur I tried doing things differently trying to avoid it, then I realized I was the bug, I didn’t check the box that makes the installer format the ext4 partition I was targeting, it was almost 4 am in the morning. It installed flawlessly.

This is the default gnome desktop when installed:

As you can see the default desktop presented has some interesting ideas, it has 2 different volume sliders, I couldn’t find a use for that, I think I understand why it can give me more control over my volume but I think one slider over the main channel is enough. It has an applet on the bottom right showing every mounted drive, that’s comfortable indeed if you open drives constantly, but I prefer just using the Places menu. It groups the lockscreen and show desktop applet on the bottom left hand side, not bad but not to my liking really since I prefer show desktop to be on the right corner and I don’t tend to leave lock screen on my desktop although this time I was tempted to leave it in the left corner. It had an applet that inhibits the laptop from sleeping, it’s a simple on/off button that can stop the laptop from sleeping under any circumstance, I ended up removing that and just configuring my laptop to never sleep by itself, nice idea still. It has an update applet which notifies about new updates, it works pretty good, the notifications can be turned off as well. Also included a brightness control but I end up using the fn keys in my laptop anyway. Workspace switcher to the right, I think that’s a good position for it but I never use that switcher.

This is how it looks after my personal tweakings:

To finish talking about the looks, I want to say it is the most elegant linux distro I have ever used. The theme “ClearlooksSL” is a nice blend between black, blue, green and orange, they didn’t fear mixing colors. Maybe I’m not too keen on the black scroll bars but they don’t look bad really. I ended up changing the emerald windows theme after a while because the transparency on the borders was making it difficult to click them. But what I really like about the looks of Sabayon is how slick it looks, they reduced that over inflated look gnome tends to have probably by reducing the pixels per inch so the panels and menus look thiner, this automatically makes it look more spacious.

All my hardware was detected and working, the nvidia driver was included as well as all the common multimedia codecs, flashplugin, java jre, java plugin for browsers,  ”Open in Terminal” option in nautilus, wine, right resolution, rar extraction, I don’t know what else I can ask for.

I had to do a huge update that involved almost 1000 packages and that took quite a while, but I could appreciate how the gui package manager “Sulfur” works. It makes you accept to licences on the go and has a nice color formatting. It works well enough as a frontend to equo.

Equo is the package manager, it works similar to others like apt-get or yum, “equo install firefox” . I like the color formatted output it gives, it’s very informative but straight to the point. I like that if I try to install a package without having root privileges, instead of just telling me that I suck it displays information about the package.

I’m not very impressed with packages available though, some of the applications I installed were lagging behind the most recent versions I used in other distros. I guess I can compile the newest version though, Sabayon is rooted on Gentoo after all.

I think this is going to be my main distro for a long time.

The thing is elegant. From the flawless boot sequence to the loading of a user session. It is decently elegant all through the system. It boots and logs in pretty fast on a 2.53 dual core and 4gb ram plus It is responsive and stable.

I like the dock, especially with big icons.  Consistency on the notification area is achieved. I appreciate that they made the show desktop button that way, it’s exactly how I would have done it. The contextual menu and the progress bar on dock items is an opening to new functionality that was not exploited before. This will probably kill the notification area pests.

Although I find myself opening the main menu quite often I think it’s because I’m kinda forced due to the bad usability design. I don’t like the main menu concept at all, although this one is quite a decent one it’s still crap. I don’t know why having the most recent applications when you have a dock, the point of most recent applications is to have a list showing applications that are the most relevant to you, and that’s exactly what the dock does. The dark menu on the right is a non configurable waste of space, there should be an option called “Disable retarded links”. Windows fails at listing available applications, showing folders just doesn’t feel right. I like the search bar, first because it’s of quick access, just pressing the windows key, it delivers good results and opens the first application in the list by pressing enter. Unfortunately it is bloated. I like the arrows showing recent documents processed by an application. I think the shutdown button is well placed but there’s something odd about it.

I like snipping tool, im not amazed that is has it though, I expect something similar from any desktop environment that hints to be friendly.

I feel naked when on Windows I had to look for links that weren’t dead to get my software, basic software like a rar extractor, pdf reader, a decent media player  and browser. I didn’t install MS Office, I rather use Google Docs or OpenOffice if I had to. Even though I tried hard not to I ended up giving up to the Adobe patch. Hunting software gets old fast. Installing software in Windows is not friendly, every install requires the user to go usually through a step process making him take trivial decisions like installing icons mixed with options that if not disabled installs unwanted software into the system. Repository based systems definitely excel in this area.

Something that sucks is the obligation to mess with compatibility settings when running certain software. They made this horrible compatibility mess and they want the users to cover it by making them do random compatibility variations hoping one of them works.

Their file explorer is quite decent, unfortunately it’s not flexible at all and it just never feels proper.

Pardus is the official operating system of Turkey, and it is sponsored by the turkish government. It was made from scratch, that is, it is not based on another distribution like Debian or Slackware, which of course demands a lot of more work but it gives more freedom to customize it on every aspect desired. I wonder how those Turkish geeks managed to get the funding because as you will see later on, the result is remarkable, turks really know their Linux.

Installation:

Pardus comes either on a live cd version or on a standard installation version. I tried the livecd version first, but the language was turkish all around and I didn’t understand a thing, I didn’t see an option to change language at the start but I could have missed it.

So I popped in the standard installation cd. They say first impressions matter, and Pardus really listened to that because the installation interface is really really nice, it is very clean and well arranged plus it has a very nice wine-ish theme.

It first makes you agree to a GNU/GPL license, which is odd to me, I’m not used to agreeing to these very often. When I tried to right click a dialog comes up and asks you if you are a lefty so it can swap the mouse buttons, very nice. It has it’s own partition editor built which is nice though It feels a bit rudimentary.

After all is done, Pardus tells you to chill and read the messages while it installs the system, promising an average of 20 minutes of waiting depending on hardware, mine took about 20 minutes indeed. One thing I like about these messages is that they actually loop when they are all displayed, unlike Ubuntu (9.10) that says the installation is about to finish when it’s not and stops to show messages.

It then tells you installation was successful and asks you to reboot the system.

Boot Screen + Login Screen:

What can I say, beautiful.

Kaptan:

As soon as you login for the first time, you are greeted by Kaptan, a nice old man that will help you customize your desktop just the way you like it. It covers probably all the necessary tweaks that have to be done to have your system just right for you. I think every distro that tries to be solid out of the box should have this type of application.

Wallpapers:

Very nice wallpapers, including what seems to be a turkish communist plaza, and a wide selection of Anthropoides Virgo pictures, which I guess is the scientific name for awesome weird bird, and which happens to be the codename of Pardus 2009.1

Sadly all of them are ruined by the copyright markings on the bottom right.

Desktop Layout:

It comes with KDE 4.3 and it is basically the standard KDE 4 layout. It has small leave and lock screen buttons on the far right like some other distros do. It includes klipper by default, which is nice. A tiger faced icon on the far left represents the kickoff menu, which is just like any other kickoff menu…. annoying. I’m not sure if I’ll ever like this menu, I think my major concern with it is how poorly the Computer section is arranged, but anyway that’s a KDE issue. Also like most KDE distros nowadays it includes the folder view widget on the desktop, which I still don’t like.

Applications:

It comes with the basic set of KDE applications, including The Gimp, OpenOffice, Google Gadgets (ewww), Firefox, DigiCam, Java, a lot of multimedia players, their own (I think) boot menu editor which is an addition that should be considered essential these days yet it’s a rare and pleasant surprise. Surprisingly enough it doesn’t have Amarok preinstalled, even though it mentions it in the install process.

A lot of the applications have been customized to fit the Pardus theme, looking very sexy I must say.

Package Manager:

It may be hard at first to find the package manager since it is not so explicit like in other distros that disgracefully put the link everywhere they can, they do just like I like it, a link in Applications → System. Now the package manager is something Pardus should be really proud of, the user interface is very good. I might say it has something that some may consider a flaw, and some may consider a plus, it separates the searches in Installable, Installed and Upgradeable applications, unlike other package managers like Synaptic that will show you all of them on a single search, unless of course you filter them. If you select installed applications all of the applications that are installed will be unchecked, so when you check an application it is because you mean to uninstall it. Something I immediately loved, a single click checks the checkbox, something that for some reason many package managers yet fail to achieve.

As you go checking applications the status bar in the bottom will get updated, showing how many applications you have chosen, including the size of installation/uninstallation. Then when you want to install/uninstall you click the Install (or Uninstall) button on the top, just like Synaptic it will show you the overview of the upcoming process, you confirm it and a password prompt appears, yes, unlike other package managers that ask for your password at the mere beginning.

Now this feature is amazing, when you finish installing the applications, it shows a pop up box with links to the applications you have just installed so you can open them easily.

(I’m still intrigued about what wiimote is, and why it was installed)

The only problem are the quantity of packages, although it has a good selection of essential packages including a lot of development tools like Eclipse, phpMyAdmin and games like Nexuiz and Tremulous it doesn’t include for example Netbeans , Gnome-Do or even Xchat.

Network Manager:

Pardus comes with a network manager called …. Network Manger. Not to be confused with networkmanager. It has a nice icon on the panel but not as intuitive as the networkmanager icons. One of the annoying things about this manager is that a profile must be created before you can connect to a network, but once that process is accomplished getting connected is quite easy. I like that it gets connected automatically with the profile I created, unlike others that obscure options need to be found to activate automatic connection. Anyway, it works fine.

File Manager:

Non surprisingly, Pardus uses Dolphin as it’s main file manager, though it still keeps Konqueror, I don’t know why. The home folder is arranged on a peculiar way, it has a Documents and a Downloads folder. The Documents folder has Music, Pictures and Videos folders, I must say I actually like that arrangement. The icons used are very nice too, and of course you can’t miss the red navigation buttons. On a personal note I must say I’m liking Dolphin more and more everyday.

Multimedia:

A lot of distributions proudly describe how they can play youtube videos, wma’s, mpeg’s, mp3′s etc out of the box. Well Pardus does this. I went to youtube and clicked on some bizarre football video with a midget and it played well, including the audio. Then I downloaded wma, mpg AND quicktime (.mov) videos about some strange programming framework, they all played well. At first the wma wouldn’t play on smplayer, but dragonplayer played it just fine.

Final Thoughts:

I remember when I checked Pardus 2009 back in the day, I went straight to their IRC channel in Freenode to congratulate them. There were just like 20 people in the room. I congratulate them and tell them how I was amazed by Pardus, they were obviously flattered but they told me they were sad about one thing, I asked them what could that be, they said “Pardus” wouldn’t allow the creation of a community. Without a community based development cycle they can make changes more freely and as long as the head of the project has good ideas (apparently he/she does) it’s all good. On the downside, not having a community plus not being compatible with other distributions like Debian, their package collection indeed stays limited. I just went to the irc room again and although I didn’t get news about a community forming I discovered Turkey has actually a very solid democratic government.

All in all, Pardus is an excellent distribution, a pleasant surprise to people like me who like to pick random distros on distrowatch and try them. I almost had a religious experience with it, amazed at how well a distribution could be made at great detail. Back in the Pardus 2009 days, I remember all linux distros failed to bring an out of the box stable KDE 4 system that looked nice, but Pardus did that, and now with KDE 4.3 it’s even better. Unfortunately their lack of packages made me switch to another distribution after a couple of days, but it is perfect for people who don’t demand a big collection of packages, the everyday man/woman who just want to work using the usual tools. If you want to recommend a very nice, stable and functional KDE distribution you should really take Pardus into consideration.

Edit: Apparently Pardus does have a community on the rise. An evidence of that is this messageboard http://worldforum.pardus-linux.nl/

I must say Linux Mint has a very good reputation in the Linux world, personally I find it astonishing how big this community based distribution has become, coming close to the point of dethroning his own father Ubuntu. Just take a look at the current Distrowatch ranking:

1      Ubuntu          2280
2     Fedora            1730
3     Mint               1552
4     openSUSE     1389
5     Mandriva       1155
6     Debian             998
7     Sabayon          835
8     Arch                  835
9     Puppy               816
10   PCLinuxOS     799

Installation

The installation is the typical Ubuntu installation and it went just fine as expected. I must say I would like to see the option to switch the introductory messages it displays or at least they should loop until the installation is finished, they stop too early in the installation, I know that is an Ubuntu thing but still.

First Looks

I like the looks on the boot screen and the login screen. The chosen wallpaper is awesome although the wallpapers included are not that good, plus they insist on putting the mint logo on every one of them, I think the should grab some of the unbranded wallpapers that come with gnome, some of them are quite nice, or get some other nice royalty free images as wallpapers. The theme used overall the system is quite nice, they sure know how to use green properly. The Home folder includes some folders by default, but that’s ok, they’re empty and doesn’t look bloated, plus the icons they chose are nice.

Desktop Layout

I’ve never been a big fan of Mint’s desktop layout, there are some things that have always bothered me. First I don’t like the tomboy applet between the Menu and the Show Desktop applets, I feel it just doesn’t look right. I would prefer the tomboy applet on the left of the clock to somehow make it look like part of the rest of the “notification area”. Plus why use tomboy when gnote does the same job perfectly and it doesn’t use mono? Also I would prefer to have the Show Desktop applet on the right corner of the panel for easy access. Kudos for not putting the Trash on the panel, I hate that.

Desktop Icons

I don’t know why distros insist on showing the drives on the desktop, it’s really not necessary and it looks ugly. One of the first things I do when installing a gnome system is disabling that option in gconf-editor, I really think it should come disabled by default as well as the Computer and Home folders. You can access them easily with the menu, it simply ruins the desktop harmony.

The Menu

This is one of the things I never liked about Mint. The Mint Menu is a customized menu made for Mint and I’ll give them credit for that, not every distro builds their own menu, plus it appears to be popular among users, but I don’t like it, it makes me dizzy. First of all I think it’s huge, it takes almost 1/4 of screen space when opened and since I’m more of a minimalist type of guy it bothers me. I don’t feel the Favorites and All applications sections look different enough to quickly know what you are looking at, especially since it remembers which one you used last, instead of always showing Favorites when opened or always showing All applications, couldn’t find an option for that. I would set it to always show Favorites. Then there are a lot of options on the left side, fortunately they can be disabled on the preferences. Why have Software Manager and Package Manager? They serve practically the same function, it’s confusing, I guess Software Manager does not deal with individual packages. Now Mint Menu has something that’s really amazing, when you search for a program and it’s not installed it shows options like Search Portal, Search Repositories, Show Package, Install Package, so if you look for emesene and it is not installed, you can simply click Install package emesene, put the password, confirm, done. Awesomeness. I think though, that they have too many options, I would leave just the Install package option and ditch the rest. Another nice function is right clicking an icon and having the option to make it show in the Favorites, to launch at login or to uninstall. Btw I found a bug, when right clicking a program and the clicking the menu again, the menu won’t disappear when clicking outside of it, like it should. The menu is very powerful yet I don’t like it, I just don’t feel comfortable with it because of the way it’s arranged.

Mint Update

Another thing I dislike. I don’t like the whole idea of separating the updates in levels, if it’s going to select 1,2 and 3 by default anyway it might as well just hide that level information from the end user and show the updates. The levels should be an internal thing that can be set in the preferences but not the main interface. But that’s not what actually bothers me about Mint Update, what really get on my nerves are icons it uses. It actually uses 4 different icons, icons to show “Busy”, “System up-to-date”, “Updates available”, “Error”. You almost need to take a tutorial to understand this. The error icon is plain stupid, I hate watching that broken lock with the red X every time I use synaptic or I’m disconnected from the network, everytime I see it I think my system is having a seizure. For some reason an open lock means Updates Available, well it makes sense, your system is outdated so it’s open to threats, ok. But then you have a closed lock that means busy, and a closed lock with a green check that means everything is ok. I don’t know why the close lock means it’s busy, a close lock gives me the feeling the system is up to date, the system up to date icon is just unnecessary. Bottom line is, it should use just 2 icons, an open lock and a closed lock, open means outdated, closed means updated. If they want to show the updater is working they can make it blink a bit, or use an animated gear or something.

Applications

Apart from the typical applications included in Ubuntu it has some nice additions I
find quite useful, like Xchat (instant win), giver, some Mint applications like MintUploader and 2 front ends of mplayer, I don’t know why they have done this, along with Totem it has 3 media players + rhythmbox. They included Pidgin instead of Empathy, they must have their reasons. As a recommendation, I would say including Cheese would be a good idea, and maybe Audacity too.

Software Manager

It appears to be some kind of synaptic-like package manager but with some nice additions. It shows the score for the applications, reviews, average rating, number of views ….wait a minute, score and average rating, what’s the difference? I don’t know really. One thing I really liked is that it shows a snapshot of the application when it is selected. One thing I didn’t like, in order to select an applications to be installed, it has to be selected first and then click the button Install, there’s no other way, like a simple and intuitive double click for example, instead a double click shows a more detailed description of the applications, which is good but it can be selected from a right click menu or on a tab underneath. It has Featured Applications section with some applications that Mint thinks you might like, including VLC, Virtualbox, Opera, F-Spot, aMule, Amarok, Adobe Acrobat Reader ……. why would they recommend a closed source pdf viewer is beyond me, evince can read pdf’s perfectly. Too bad they don’t recommend Gnome-Do, Banshee or Songbird.

Firefox and bookmarks

I just want to say I don’t like when distros flood web browsers with bookmarks, and Mint
just loves to do that. The default Firefox shows a bookmark toolbar filled with Linux Mint links to different sections of their site, apparently making the linux mint website the home page was not enough.

Suspend + Hibernate
Worked perfectly, although I felt the hibernate process a bit unpleasant, I don’t know why hibernate still exists anyway.

Hardware
The integrated video card from the laptop I used was successfully detected and compositing
was automatically enabled, providing me with nice compiz effects, just the necessary to make it look good, not the full blown effects, just like I like it. The network, sound and video worked perfectly out of the box.

Final Thoughts

Linux Mint is indeed a very nice distribution, a very stable one. It really just works out of the box and is perfect for people who don’t want to mess with their computer to make it work or for people who don’t like to customize it a lot. The menu and mint updater can be annoying, at least for me, but it does what it promises and looking sexy while at it. I perceive a very positive response from people about the distro and I feel it may actually become the most popular home Linux distro one day, which would only show that small communities with good ideas and dedication can yield a better product than sponsored or corporative distributions.