> One of my all-time favorite Linux distros is a long-defunct Gentoo derivative called Sabayon which I daily drove for years. I don't regret it in the slightest! It was a great distro.
Interestingly, both projects actually have a bit of shared history[0].
Funtoo joined Sabayon to become MocaccinoOS[1], before the alliance seemingly fell apart[2] and the two projects went their separate ways.
Yep. That's why I (admittedly lazily) asked about MocaccinoOS earlier. This Funtoo business brought the fate of Sabayon to mind for me, because it was an old favorite.
Sabayon shipped with all kinds of over-the-top compositor effects back when those things were new to Linux (and Windows, for that matter). It was also highly styled out-of-the-box, in a somewhat extreme way, a bit like Garuda Linux today. That stuff was a lot of fun and very appealing for me as a young teenager!
At the same time it had a binary package manager whose command line and configuration interfaces were very similar to those of Portage, supporting the same notions of 'masking'. It had very pretty colorized terminal output, and it was extremely fast. It was also compatible with Portage, though in a clunky way because it kept its own package database in a different format— you had to issue a special command to sync the databases of the two package managers so they could both know what all was installed on your system in an accurate way. Later on in the distro's life, using Portage became 'unsupported' in that developers didn't want to help users troubleshoot related issues. But I never stopped using both package managers together, and that never stopped working.
Depending on how far you wanted to go, Sabayon could work nicely as basically a stable, graphical installer for Gentoo (just abandon the binary packages after install and start customizing everything), or you could stick mainly to the binary packages and use the Gentoo repositories (and overlays) much like Arch users use the AUR. (Having run both for years, I'd say using Sabayon this way was definitively better than using Arch and the AUR.)
At the time, the Portage-like masking features made Entropy the most flexible binary package manager I'd ever used when it came to pinning and selecting packages. The combination of binary packaging (which is fast) and source-based packaging (which makes software easy to customize and patch) in Sabayon was amazing despite the clumsiness of using two package managers and convincing them to interoperate. Later (later for me, at least), Nix's transparent binary caching system would blow all that out of the water, of course. But Sabayon was awesome at the time. And it was the gateway to my first stage3 Gentoo install, which was a really productive and memorable experience for me, itself!
Anyway: RIP, Sabayon. RIP, Funtoo. Niche distros like these can be innovative, stylish, and fun. And often their small communities are outstandingly expert, which is a massive, massive plus for newbies who can figure out how to be thoughtful and polite when asking for help.
Interestingly, both projects actually have a bit of shared history[0].
Funtoo joined Sabayon to become MocaccinoOS[1], before the alliance seemingly fell apart[2] and the two projects went their separate ways.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33204970
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220619205105/https://www.sabay...
[2] https://www.mocaccino.org/blog/2021/12/06/updates-on-funtoo-...