So hello all just thought I'd stop by introduce myself. I am reaching you from a a Dell Lap-Top (Inspiron 1721) running Sabayon 13.08 Gnome. The lap-top is probably turning 5 years old this fall. It was originally equipped with Vista and had been more or less useless for anything for at least the last two years.
I tried various linux incarnations before settling on Sabayon. I have in the past tried Red-Hat and Mandrake (back in the day) and more recently Fedora, Bodhi and Ubuntu. I also booted Mint, PCLinuxOS and others from DVD images. But that by no means makes me an experienced Linux user.
I did actually try an older version of Sabayon first, i.e. nr. 8 from a Linux Format DVD, and was very impressed. So I burned an image of 13.08 and that then brought me here. I simply installed the system as recommended - no fiddling.
I do have one issue though. It may well be hardware rather than software. When I reboot the system and come to the first log-in window my screen is broken into three or four triangles and the user-name and log-in space are hard to see. This is not such a big problem as long as I am the only user (I simply type my password) but I would prefer to fix this if I can.
Another general question is. Should I go with a "lighter" desktop environment than Gnome.