Gentoo rolled out the beta on April 1st and so I decided I would give the livedvd a whirl and see what they have done and include some screen shots. It came with a load of desktops like xfce, gnome, enlightenment, kde, and afterstep to just to name a few. I couldn’t get the E-Gnome to work and enlightenment was only e16 still, which is just god awful compared to e17. They kept everything minimal and ugly. The desktops are all bare bone, no fancy themes or colors, not even a Gentoo logo for wallpaper. No nvidia drivers so I was stuck running the wrong resolution for my 1440×900 screen. You don’t even get flash or java either, which makes web browsing a real downer. It was smooth and very responsive for a livedvd tho. Things opened up very quickly and things seemed really stable. It has version KDE 3.5.8 and Gnome 2.20.0, so obviously stable branch. It was weird to see those version after running ~arch for so long. Anyway, for beta1, it’s got great potential. You can download and give it a test drive also. I had the livedvd downloaded in a couple hours with bittorrent.