This really is very, very nice indeed. My current favourite – Mint – is definitely facing competition now.

Just for the heck of it, I'm going to try writing this in OpenOffice (version 3.2, which is nice) and then copying and pasting it to the thread. Apologies in advance if anything strange happens.

I'm now running the Sabayon 5.2 live DVD on the trusty old Dell desktop – 2.0ghz CPU and 1 gb of RAM – and to be honest, it's really not much slower than Mint, which is installed. At the moment the system monitor shows about 25% CPU use and 278mb of memory in use. That's with Firefox running, plus OpenOffice Writer and the system monitor.

With this amount of RAM, it was a simple matter to import all my Firefox bookmarks via a USB flash drive, and took only a couple of minutes to install the usual four add-ons.

Bear in mind that this is all running within that 278mb of memory in use.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sabayon

gives a useful list of what's included. Looks like it's still using GRUB 1 (1.98?) - I read somewhere that this is still easier with three or more distros/operating systems installed. Must say, GRUB 2 on Mint 8 was nice once I worked out that all that was needed to include Windoze in the system was a GRUB update – after ages trying to figure out just what was happening. Wish I were brighter.

It has something called the XBMC Media Centre. I have absolutely no idea what to do with it, but it really does look awfully polished, whatever it is – looks, as per its name like a centralised app for handling all one's media...

Still – enough pre bed-time playing. And I am not going to get trapped into trying out the World of Goo demo... am I?

Ha - and it copied and pasted fine from Writer.

Steve - I quite understand your fears. As a lifelong bachelor, I've always managed to get to the terminally terrified stage before actually marrying the dragons. Oops - I mean gentle little cooing doves.