Another day, another operating system.

Today it's Sabayon 4.2 in Gnome desktop flavour.

I've become a bit of a fan of Sabayon over the last couple of years, but with this latest version I think they've done something a bit special for a linux distro. Even Ben commented on how it looked good and not like a skinned windows install.

Last night I compared live CDs of Ubuntu 9.04 Priapic Pigeon and Sabayon 4.2 KDE desktop version back to back. Ubuntu booted quite quickly for a live CD, and seemed reasonably functional - pretty typical Ubuntu interface, smudgy fonts, muddy brown theme, reasonable functionality, all the usual bits built in with a typical Linux distro. For styling it looks like it's trying to compete with windows 95.

Directly afterward I popped in the Sabayon KDE DVD. This is the crisped, sharpest version of Linux I've ever seen! Screen fonts barely smudge, and are close to windows - certainly better than apples blurry offerings. The whole thing just looked sharp and stylish, and because it's running KDE, just a bit different - as different as and Apple from a Microsoft install. Today I downloaded the Gnome desktop version, and although it's a little less stylish than KDE it is still VERY attractive and easier to navigate - and that's what I'm posting from now. It also seems more stable than many live installs - I bunged this in at 6.30pm and went out to circuit training - here it is still working fine.

Another things that's different from other Linux installs is that everything (so far) seems to work, and it's even playing a DVD movie in drive 2 with the live DVD in drive 1. No extra software to install, no codecs, no DeCSS. It just works. Ah, not quite perfect - tried to skip ahead, but it just stopped. Now on re-starting the DVD is playing in German, and I can't access the menu to change language.

This is a Linux install that I *feel* I could live with. Having come through all the pain of coping with Apple's offering, this one feels like it would be quite worthwhile to learn.

Wonder what the web development tools are like?

So if you use Linux or wanted an alternative to Vista/OSX I'd recommend giving it a try.

*edit*
They've reworked Open Office 3.1 so that it's themed to the look of the distro, and it's a really cool look.