Sabayon appears to still be working

Which is good.

Still can't transfer emails (which is bad).

Pretty sure Audio isn't working (bad)

Internet seems fast enough (good).

I think the KDE interface/text is crisper than Gnome. Having said that, I prefer the gnome pop-up menu system over menus that require you to click and scroll to navigate.

Sabayon's a lot slicker than Ubuntu (and the way you can handle all file formats etc is spot on) but task bar icons still seem slightly childish compared to classic windows or OSX.

Having run with this for 3 weeks, I'd feel slightly insecure with it if this were the only OS available, but I could certainly live with this if it were all that was available. That sounds damning, but it's real praise after all the shonky, broken, fuzzy, semi-functional Linux installs I've had over the last 5 years.

Certainly Sabayon has been the stand out distro ever since I discovered it. Open SUSE 11 KDE was pretty good, though fragile. Did look nice in it's green livery. I had an install of Mandriva Power version 2008 for a bit, and although it played DVDs and actually found some repositories (another curious failing of almost every distro was NEVER finding repositories) Open Office was broken (why, for heaven sakes?). Fedora looked quite nice too (I even use Fedora wallpaper on the Macbook) but it only had minimal functionality out of the box and all peripherals required purchasing a driver (often for £30ish). I couldn't bear to type much in Ubuntu, fonts are displayed so badly, and stuff doesn't work out of the box either. Mint was like a version of Ubuntu that someone had tried to polish, but it was fragile.

So here I sit, running the Linux box I always threatened to do, and mostly happy with it. I'm slightly tempted to do a fresh reinstall, ignore/turn off update notification and just install the apps I need to make it work for me.

Is it as good/better than XP?

The jury's out. My feeling is probably not, but it's 'good enough' right now.