What happened to Sabayon Linux

The short answer, before the long one. Sabayon Linux · Ended shipped its last release, 19.03, in March 2019, built its last daily image on 8 July 2020, announced on 20 November 2020, in two posts published the same day, that it was renaming itself MocaccinoOS, merging with Funtoo and replacing its package manager, and lost its forum, its wiki, and finally — on 14 March 2023, to an offshore gambling site — the address it had answered on since 2006. MocaccinoOS · Shipping released version 26.08 on 1 August 2026, three days before this was written. Every one of those dates is checkable, and the rest of this piece shows how.

The reason to write it out is that the usual answer — “it became MocaccinoOS” — skips the part a reader actually wants, which is when the machine you are running stopped being maintained. That is not the date of the rename. It is somewhere between March 2019 and July 2020, depending on which piece of the project you mean, and the project never published it.

The quiet years were not quiet in the way people remember

The received version is that Sabayon went silent after 2018 and drifted. The record is more specific and more interesting: the talking stopped in January 2018 and the building carried on for two and a half more years.

2018·01·15The year opened with an incident. During a weekly repository update, a package containing an experimental Monero miner — meant only for the project’s own infrastructure hosts — was promoted by mistake into the main Sabayon repositories. Anyone who ran equo update or let Rigo auto-update inside a window of under 24 hours could end up with a process named sd on one core and a marker file the build system used to identify its own machines.

Credit where it is due, because this is the part that gets left out when the story is retold as a scandal: the project disclosed it the same day, named the reporter who found it, published the wallet address so anyone could audit how much had been mined — the answer was about five euros — and committed the proceeds to charity. It also stated the cause in one clause that turns out to be the whole history of this distribution: the package build process involved manual work by several people on the same server.

2018·01·21Six days later came a post about the future, and it is the last thing the blog ever published under the Sabayon name. It named four new contributors by handle, described a 2017 move to better build hardware, asked for donations, and committed to a new release strategy: stable releases twice a year on the April/November rhythm Ubuntu uses, paired with LTS kernels, with monthly and daily images continuing as untested builds. The reason given for the change was plain — the old cycle was not sustainable with the number of people available.

Measured against that promise, what followed is more interesting than the usual telling. The April 2018 release happened: 18.05, on 12 April 2018. The November one did not. The next release after that was 19.03 in March 2019, off the promised cycle, and it was the last.

2018·04·12A detail worth having, because it confuses people reading old release tables: Sabayon’s version numbers ran ahead of the calendar. 18.05 shipped in April, 17.12 shipped on 29 November 2017, 16.11 shipped on 28 October 2016. The number was the month the release was aimed at, not the month it arrived — so a machine labelled 18.05 is an April 2018 machine, and 19.03 is the one release whose label and date agree.

2019·03·27The 19.03 images — GNOME, KDE, LXQt, MATE, Minimal, Xfce, Server — sit on the ibiblio mirror with file dates of 27 March 2019, each with its MD5 file, package list and torrent alongside. So the last release of Sabayon Linux has three defensible dates, and the disagreement between them is not a mistake by anybody. The release ships a file called RELEASE_DATE_19.03 whose single line reads 22 March 2019, 10:24 UTC — that is when the images were built. The files reached the mirror five days later. DistroWatch’s announcement, which is also the date Wikipedia’s infobox takes from Wikidata, is 31 March. Build, publish, announce: nine days end to end, and only the first two are recorded anywhere on disk.

2020·07·08The dailies, meanwhile, kept running for another sixteen months. The final set on ibiblio is stamped 8 July 2020: seven images, Server first and Xfce last, all of them written between 07:50 and 13:59 in the mirror’s local clock — the same run wrote its RELEASE_DATE_DAILY file at 21:19:56 UTC, which is what fixes those listing times as US Eastern rather than UTC. Nothing was built the next day, or after. The ISO tree’s own sync timestamp, still readable at iso/TIMESTAMP, reads 1594256402 — 9 July 2020 at 01:00:02 UTC. That is the closest thing to a time of death the artifacts will give you.

What I could not fill in. There is no public record I could find of what happened to the April/November cadence: no post-mortem, no mailing-list thread, no announcement that 19.03 would be the last stable image. The forum where that discussion would have happened is gone — what survived of it, and where is its own piece — so the gap between March 2019 and November 2020 is, for now, unrecoverable from primary sources. If you have an archived thread that closes it, [email protected].

November 2020 bundled three separate changes into one announcement

2020·11·20On 20 November 2020 the project published two posts on the same day. The first announced that Sabayon was rebranding to MocaccinoOS and that Luet — a Go package manager in development since 2019 — would eventually replace Entropy. The second announced that the project was joining forces with Funtoo and that the two development teams were merging. Daniel Robbins posted the counterpart announcement on the Funtoo forums the same day.

One correction to the received version, and it matters for everything downstream. The Funtoo post does not say Sabayon was changing its base. It announces a merger of teams and a mutual exchange of tooling, and then says in as many words that there is no final decision yet on how the projects will move forward. The base change is an inference — DistroWatch made it two days later under the headline “Sabayon to be based on Funtoo”, Wikipedia repeated it citing the same post, and DistroWatch’s page still lists Sabayon’s base as Funtoo today. No Sabayon release was ever built on Funtoo, and none could have been: the last one shipped twenty months before the announcement, and what MocaccinoOS actually built on turned out to be Gentoo. A distribution that never shipped a Funtoo image has been described as Funtoo-based in its two most-read reference entries for six years.

Read as engineering, each of the three is defensible. Read as communication, publishing them together was the mistake. A user with a working Sabayon desktop was asked in one sitting to accept a new name, a new upstream and a new package manager, with no way to evaluate any of them independently — and the posts themselves said the new system was not ready for daily use and should not be put on a machine anyone relied on. That is an honest thing to say and a fatal thing to pair with a rename. The set of people willing to follow a project through three simultaneous changes is much smaller than the set willing to follow it through any one of them, and this project had spent thirty-four months not talking to those people.

The posts were precise about one operational detail that mattered and is worth repeating: the sabayon-weekly repositories were already frozen, while the main repositories on sabayonlinux.org would keep receiving updates until MocaccinoOS was bootstrapped. No end date was given for that arrangement, and none was ever published.

It made one more commitment, in a single sentence, that is worth writing down here because a later section turns on it: migration to MocaccinoOS would work from any flavour of Sabayon. That is a promise about the machine in front of the reader rather than about the project, and it is the only one of the three announcements that a user could have checked afterwards. Hold onto it.

Underneath the announcement, the thing that actually ends projects

Sabayon’s pitch was a Gentoo you did not have to compile. Delivering that meant operating a binary distribution on top of a source distribution that moves every day: build servers, a package database, an ISO pipeline, mirror capacity, and a person to drive all of it. The distribution had a name for its half of that machinery — Entropy, with equo on the command line and Rigo as the graphical client — and by the project’s own account it did the user-facing job well for years. That is the rebrand post’s assessment, not mine: it opens its criticism of Entropy by saying the thing had proven itself over the years, and then puts every limitation it lists on the maintainer’s side of the wall.

The maintainer-facing half is what gave way, and the project said so itself, twice, two years apart. The January 2018 incident post attributed the mistake to manual work by different staff on a shared build server. The November 2020 rebrand post listed Entropy’s limitations from the maintainer’s side in almost the same terms: packages maintained by hand, a central server required to build them, no reproducible builds, no straightforward path to community repositories, no native distributed compilation, and a build host that was both a single point of failure and a place where only one person could work at a time.

That is not a project that made a bad decision. That is a project whose weekly cost sat on one machine and, effectively, one pair of hands — and every week that cost is due again whether or not anyone has time. Luet’s design was a direct answer to it: build in containers, share build environments through registries, let anyone reproduce the tree. Whether the answer arrived in time is the subject of the next two sections.

2021 to 2026: what the old URLs answer with today

The forums and the wiki went first — Fitzcarraldo’s farewell post of 20 January 2021 records both as already gone — and the domain itself went last, in stages, in a way that is worth reading closely if you have ever wondered what happens to a distribution’s address after the distribution stops.

2023·03·14The domain’s own story is the bleakest line in this piece, and the Archive dates it to the day. The Sabayon Linux website was still answering at sabayon.org in the capture of 13 March 2023 at 22:33 UTC — two years after the project it described had stopped existing, and still titled as though someone might download something. The next capture, 14 March 2023 at 18:59 UTC, is an Indonesian slot-gambling site. Under twenty-one hours between the two, which is what a domain transfer looks like from the outside.

What followed is worth having as a sequence, because it is the standard decay curve for a name that used to be worth something and the dates are all checkable in the Archive’s index. The gambling site held the address for nearly two and a half years, through the capture of 25 August 2025. By 17 October 2025 it had been replaced by a hosting control panel’s stopped-site page — the kind a server puts up when the account behind it is suspended — and that page was still there on 14 March 2026. From 17 April 2026 the captures stop getting a page at all: Cloudflare answers for the domain and reports that the origin behind it timed out. Since 24 June 2026 the error has been the more final one, an origin that refuses the connection, and that is still what the address returns today. The registration, last updated in January 2025, runs to 5 May 2027 in somebody’s hands. Somebody is paying for a name that has served nothing since April, and served the project for none of the last three years.

A death is not an announcement, it is a list of last times

If you want a defensible answer to “when did Sabayon end”, you have to pick which ending you mean. Here are the ones with dates on them.

Read down that column and the shape is clear. Communication stopped first, by nearly three years. Releases stopped next. The build machinery kept turning for another year after the last release anyone could install. The source repositories were tidied for a year after that. And the registration outlives the last commit by four more years, which is the normal case: domains renew themselves long after the people have gone.

So did Sabayon die, or did it change its name?

MocaccinoOS is real and it ships. The earliest release still published in its image repository is an alpha dated 9 October 2021 — roughly eleven months after the announcement, and fifteen after the last Sabayon build — and it now publishes on a monthly calendar, with 26.08 released on 1 August 2026 carrying the 6.18.41 LTS kernel, Plasma 6.6.6, COSMIC 1.5, Mesa 26.1.5 and Calamares 3.4.2, and with its package and layer builds moved onto Docker Buildx. The project’s own site describes its desktop variant as Gentoo-based and, in as many words, a former Sabayon branch. The old Sabayon GitHub organisation is still standing with its 66 repositories, none of them touched since 2023, and its homepage field now points at mocaccino.org; the code that ships lives in a separate organisation. The estate has a forwarding address.

So the continuity is genuine — in people, in repositories, in intent. My answer is still that Sabayon ended, and here is the test I am applying: a distribution is the thing a user runs, not the team that produces it. By that test the rename is not the event; the replacement of the machinery is. Entropy is gone, equo is gone, and the repositories a Sabayon box talks to are frozen or redirected. Now collect the promise from November 2020 — migration would work from any flavour of Sabayon. The document that keeps it is still online, and the piece that read it line by line found its preparation step drives Entropy, whose repositories no longer exist. So the route is published, unretracted, and starts by asking a 2019 machine to talk to servers that were switched off in 2020. That is not the same as a lie; it is a 2021 intention with nobody left to notice that it stopped being true. But it means a user cannot follow the name without a reinstall, and that is the difference between a rebrand and an estate.

What would change my mind: a documented, currently-working in-place migration from an installed Sabayon 19.03 to a current MocaccinoOS release. If that exists and I have missed it, it belongs in Corrections and I will say so there.

The base was the one question this piece opened without an answer, and it is worth recording how it closed, because the shape of the mistake is instructive. Six years of coverage said Funtoo; the project’s own site in 2026 said Gentoo; and settling that needed build definitions rather than more reading of announcements. It was the first open cell in the Register and the job of a later piece on MocaccinoOS specifically. That piece is now written, and the definitions settle it: the base is Gentoo, the Funtoo collaboration was abandoned by the project itself in December 2021, and the discrepancy was never a change of mind — it was a headline written from a post that had explicitly declined to make the decision.

If you still run it

Three doors, in descending order of how much I would recommend them. I have not run any of this; what follows is what the artifacts and the documentation support, and where a claim is inference rather than record I have said so.

• Move to Gentoo. The general rule for a dead derivative is to move to the thing it was derived from, and here that rule is unusually clean: Entropy packages were built from Gentoo, so the underlying system was already Gentoo-shaped. The in-place conversion is a real procedure with real failure modes, and it is worked through stage by stage in Your distro just died: the first thirty days.
• Reinstall onto something current. For most machines this is faster and ends in a better state than a staged conversion, which is an unromantic verdict but the honest one. The candidates — Redcore, Calculate, MocaccinoOS, matrixOS, and plain Gentoo with the official binary host — are compared on documented properties in The five candidates for “Sabayon in 2026”.
• Keep it, but take it off the network. Nothing in the system has had a kernel, OpenSSL or browser update since 2019 or 2020, and the repositories it would fetch from are frozen where they stopped or, in the case of sabayonlinux.org, now answer any request with a redirect to a GitHub page. As an offline machine, a virtual machine, or a museum piece, it is fine and interesting — the release history has the surviving images and their checksums. As an internet-facing desktop it is not.

Appendix A: what I could not establish

• Why the April/November cadence promised in January 2018 held once, in April 2018, and then stopped — and whether 19.03 was intended as the last stable release. No primary source survives that says.
• The exact dates the forum and wiki hosts stopped resolving. The January 2021 farewell post shows both were gone by then; the DNS records that would date it precisely are not archived.
• Whether MocaccinoOS’s current base is Gentoo, Funtoo, or Gentoo again after a period on Funtoo. Settled after publication, 2026-08-04: Gentoo, and it never shipped on Funtoo — the evidence is here. The narrower question this entry left open — whether the October 2021 and February 2022 alpha images, released while the Funtoo branch was live, were built against that tree — closed the same day and from the same files. The build definitions were read at the commits current when each image was tagged, ef92d369a1 and 3ccadc76f8, and both already named category: "gentoo" and github.owner: gentoo. No image the project has tagged was built on Funtoo.
• The state of community.mocaccino.org. Its DNS resolves, but connections from here timed out on 2026-08-04. That may be the host or it may be my route, and one vantage point is not evidence.
• Who currently holds sabayon.org, and whether the 2023 gambling site was the same party. Registrant details are redacted.

Appendix B: the address you are reading this on

This site is published at lxnaydesign.net, which is where the project began — the personal site of Fabio Erculiani, where the Gentoo-based live DVD called RR4, and its 64-bit twin RR64, were downloaded from before the 2006 rename to Sabayon. That part of the story, release by release, is its own piece, and it dates the rename twice, because it happened twice: the new name reached this domain’s masthead between the Archive’s captures of 12 and 29 June 2006, and it became something you could download on 16 August 2006 with release 3.0RC2. Set that against the registrations. sabayon.org was created on 5 May 2006 — seven weeks before the name appeared here, three months before it shipped — and sabayonlinux.org on 9 September 2006, just over three weeks after. Somebody registered the name before announcing it and the second domain after the first release, which is a small piece of evidence for how deliberate the move was.

This domain was lxnay dEsigN, the home of RR4/RR64 Linux — later Sabayon — from 2005 to 2006. It changed hands several times afterwards and was re-registered in 2026 by the publisher of Still Seeding. I am not Fabio Erculiani and am not affiliated with the Sabayon project, MocaccinoOS, matrixOS or the Gentoo Foundation.

It is worth being blunt about the symmetry. This address spent its last years before I registered it as a casino affiliate site; sabayon.org spent 2023 onward as a slot-gambling page. That is what happens to a well-linked domain when the people who earned the links stop paying attention to it, and it is the reason every claim on this site is dated and sourced: an old address is only worth anything if what it says now is true.

Read next

• RR4 → RR64 → Sabayon: the complete release history — where this distribution came from, release by release, and where the surviving images legitimately live now, with checksums.
• Your distro just died: the first thirty days — what to do with a machine whose distribution no longer exists, with Sabayon → Gentoo as the worked example.
• The five candidates for “Sabayon in 2026” — the living systems that do some of what this one did, compared on documented properties.
• The board: what a one-man distro’s forum was actually reporting — the support organisation this project ran on, what its release reports contained, and which of its archives survived.

Standing — 2026-08-04

Still true

The ibiblio and UMD mirrors serve the frozen Sabayon trees; 19.03 is on both, the final dailies only on ibiblio. The wiki mirror at sabayon.github.io/wiki-next still resolves. MocaccinoOS ships monthly.

Ended / rotted

Sabayon’s forum, wiki, bug tracker and package hosts are out of DNS. The project blog exists only in the Internet Archive. Entropy, equo and Rigo have no maintained repositories to talk to.

Actively wrong

Any 2019-era guide that tells you to point a repository at sabayonlinux.org: that host now 301s every path to a GitHub page. Any page still describing Sabayon as a current distribution. DistroWatch’s table, which gives Sabayon’s base as Funtoo, and Wikipedia’s sentence that future versions would be based on Funtoo: both trace back to a post that announced a merger and explicitly deferred the decision, and no Sabayon release was ever built on Funtoo.

Not established

Why the 2018 release cadence failed; the exact dates the community hosts left DNS; the present owner of sabayon.org. Listed in full in Appendix A.

Sources & method

This piece was assembled from artifacts rather than recollection: public mirror listings and their timestamp files, DNS and whois records, GitHub repository metadata, and the project’s own posts as preserved by the Internet Archive. Archived pages were read for facts — dates, titles, version strings, file names — and nothing from them is reproduced here; every sentence above is mine. No Sabayon or MocaccinoOS machine was installed or run in the writing of it, and no claim above depends on one having been. All URLs accessed 2026-08-04.

1. Sabayon blog, “Critical Incident - 2018-01-15”, posted 2018-01-15. Internet Archive capture.
2. Sabayon blog, “Sabayon is still around!”, posted 2018-01-21. Internet Archive capture.
3. Sabayon blog, “Sabayon project is rebranding to MocaccinoOS”, posted 2020-11-20. Internet Archive capture.
4. Sabayon blog, “Sabayon and Funtoo Linux Merge Projects”, posted 2020-11-20. Internet Archive capture.
5. Archived Sabayon blog index, capture of 2020-08-20, used to establish that no post appeared between 2018-01-21 and the rebrand. Internet Archive capture.
6. Daniel Robbins, “Funtoo Linux and Sabayon joining forces”, forums.funtoo.org, 2020-11-20.
7. distro.ibiblio.org/sabayonlinux/ — directory listings for iso/monthly, iso/daily and stable/; the file iso/TIMESTAMP (value 1594256402 = 2020-07-09 01:00:02 UTC); iso/monthly/RELEASE_DATE_19.03 (“Fri Mar 22 10:24:00 UTC 2019”); and iso/daily/RELEASE_DATE_DAILY (“Wed 08 Jul 2020 09:19:56 PM UTC”), which is what identifies the listing clock as US Eastern.
8. mirror.umd.edu/sabayonlinux/ — directory listings and mirror.umd.edu.timestamp.txt (Last-Modified 2024-10-02), plus the dated mirror notices on mirror.umd.edu, including the entry of 20 August 2023 on the state of the Sabayon links.
9. GitHub API, Sabayon/entropy, Sabayon/molecules, Sabayon/sabayon-distro, Sabayon/wiki-next, Sabayon/pkgs-checker and the Sabayon organisation — last-commit and last-push timestamps.
10. GitHub API, mocaccinoOS/mocaccino releases — 32 releases, earliest 2021-10-09, latest v26.08 on 2026-08-01.
11. MocaccinoOS, release notes for v26.08, 2026-08-01, and the project’s front page for its description of the desktop variant.
12. github.com/lxnay/matrixos — repository created 2026-01-31, the destination of the sabayonlinux.org redirect.
13. whois records for sabayon.org (created 2006-05-05, expiry 2027-05-05, updated 2025-01-07) and sabayonlinux.org (created 2006-09-09, expiry 2026-09-09, updated 2025-08-11); DNS and HTTP status checks of all hosts in the table above, run 2026-08-04.
14. Internet Archive CDX index for sabayon.org, 2021–2026, with the captures themselves read to date each change of occupant: project site in the capture of 2023-03-13 22:33 UTC; slot-gambling site from 2023-03-14 18:59 UTC through 2025-08-25; hosting control-panel stopped-site page from 2025-10-17 through 2026-03-14; Cloudflare 522 (origin unreachable) from 2026-04-17; Cloudflare 521 (origin refused) from 2026-06-24, which is also what the host returned to a direct request on 2026-08-04.
15. Secondary, used only to show what the standard references say: Wikipedia, “Sabayon Linux”, whose November 2020 sentence on a Funtoo base cites the merger post, and Wikidata Q640467, which supplies that article’s infobox with 19.03 dated 2019-03-31.
16. Secondary, used only for corroboration: DistroWatch’s Sabayon page — status “discontinued”; comparison table giving 19.03 as 2019-03-27, 18.05 as 2018-04-12, 17.12 as 2017-11-29 and 16.11 as 2016-10-28; release announcement dated 2019-03-31; news item 2020-11-22 — and Fitzcarraldo, “A farewell to Sabayon Linux”, 2021-01-20, for the state of the forum and wiki in January 2021.

Sabayon Linux, MocaccinoOS, matrixOS, Funtoo and Gentoo each have a row in the Register, with the date each status was last checked. Corrections, with a source, go to [email protected] and are published on Corrections.