Why Sabayon, why not Gentoo - need info

[beli0135]

Hello

I am SuSE user, thinking to go to Gentoo, and now I found out about Sabayon.
However, I could not find the page which is more or less "Why Sabayon, not Gentoo" explication what are the advantages.

Thanks
Emil

[cvill64]

SL is pure gentoo. All we did is preconfigure it for desktop/laptop usage and gave you an easy to use installer

If you want something that just works on the post, use SL; if you want to have pure, ultimate custimzation, and don't mind spending a good 3 days doing everything, go gentoo 2006.0 minimal

[beli0135]

OK, that is a lead. Thanks.

However, I would like to know following:

When SL is installed, is compilation needed, partially needed or not needed at all.
I like installer feature, but I do witnessed gentoo being awfully fast due to that 3-day recompilation.
Advantage in ready-to-run by SL is strong, but I do not know in which way it is done.

Wishes,
Emil

[cvill64]

You do not need to recompile as we've chosen the best overall settings for x86 and x86_64. However, you can easily recompile and fully optimize by editing make.conf to your likes and then doing an "emerge -uD sytem && emerge -uD world" which will take a very, very long time even if you don't run into problems. Basically, we've tried to take the power of gentoo and did a lot of the problem solving like Suse and FC does, such that you will instantly have a usable system instantly. So you can opt for going through the pain and aggony (albiet learning 100X more about gentoo) or just d/ling and iso and installing from that which you can later tweak the same as a gentoo system. Its truely up to you, I do both, it all just depends on the situtation. This also gives a lot of linux "newbies" a chance to try out gentoo w/o too much pain

[Varean]

Personally, installing Gentoo is a very rewarding experience(I learned pretty much everything I know from Gentoo) but it can casue a lot of headache(grub, incorrect USE/CFLAGS, emerging the DE). It takes me about 15 hours to emerge my desktop environment(KDE) because compilation is so slow(I was using -O3 CFLAGS then) but the thing about Sabayon is that everything is precompiled for your system, thats pretty much why I chose it as my next distro no more waiting 15 hours for KDE to compile, also with Sabayon, it is still possible to modify your make.conf and your USE flags as long as you run a revdep-rebuild or just emerge the next package you want.

[beli0135]

Thanks to everyone!

My suggestion is to point out that differences somewhere on the main page. Now you got me intrigued and I am surely going to install Sabayon when time comes (buying new machine). I cannot afford it at this very moment.