Good morning,

heartfelt congratulations to BIGBRUNO and his team for BigLinux!

I had believed for some time that there were only a handful of good distros left to keep permanently on a computer and instead I had to change my mind because I discovered that BigLinux is considerably better in many aspects, one of the best distros I have ever tried as a distrohopper hobbyist.

You can see that there is a lot of background work and attention to detail ranging from customized themes to numerous tools not present in other distros such as, for example, biglinux-grub-restore from live which allowed me to restore grub damaged by another distro in an instant.
Without forgetting less memory use (up to 40%) compared to other distros with KDE, and overall speed and fluidity even on very old hardware like mine, thanks also to the work of the Manjaro team obviously.

What about: ‘Linux as it should always have been!’.

Having said this, please accept some criticisms and suggestions to make an already very good distro even better:

The translation of native applications such as bigcontrolcenter, big-store and others into my language (Italian) is quite painful even today even if there have been improvements anyway. I suggest you try this free online translator which translates almost perfectly (personally tested):
https://www.ajexperience.com/po-translator/
If so, I will be happy to point out any imperfections ;-)
There is no wiki or guide to the native tools and it’s a shame because they are a real gem and what distinguishes BigLinux from other distros.
The Nouveau driver works pretty well until you want to see the details of your network or memory consumption because they crash your system, so consider putting nvidia-340xx-dkms 340.108 from AUR in the list of installable drivers for old legacy Nvidia graphic cards. Or import drivers from Debian SID at https://packages.debian.org/sid/nvidia-legacy-340xx-driver.
Any email manager is missing: the lack could be frustrating for those coming from the Windows world. It would be nice to be able to choose one during installation or from the introductory ‘greeter’ as possible for web browsers. Alternatively, you could suggest the Vivaldi all-in-one browser as standard, known not only for its speed and privacy, but also because it integrates email, RSS ~~and finally the StarTLS protocol~~.
Any simple drawing program is missing. Please do not include GIMP because, while it is excellent, it has a very steep learning curve like its cousin Photoshop. KolourPaint is good for beginners and is one of the few to have transparent color without complicated layers. Other good alternatives could be PhotoFlare or Pinta.
~~RHvoice is not the best text-to-speech application because it supports only a limited number of languages and I don’t see, among other things, why it should be activated by default.~~
The current Piper seems like a more considered choice but consider other valid alternatives: I personally suggest Speech Note because it supports numerous languages and voice models of various qualities and sizes, and also works as a speech-to-text and translator, all OFFLINE.
bigocrpdf-open is a good tool but there are free alternatives such as ‘NAPS2 - Not Another PDF Scanner’ which integrate many functions into a single program such as OCR and page reordering.
Consider including screenshot tools such as ~~NormCap OCR~~ Spectacle OCR Screenshot at https://github.com/funinkina/spectacle-ocr-screenshot/ to capture text instead of images, which, by the way, also works in Spectacle 6.5 or lower, and better than the OCR built into Spectacle 6.6.
~~simple-scan is better than Skanpage because it allows you to easily reorder pages from cheap scanners without a double-sided feeder.~~
Consider an alternative to good old Libreoffice: ONLYOFFICE is free and fast and offers a native ChatGPT plugin for generative AI.
Krusader file manager in administration mode from the Tools menu does not accept the password and does not work.
~~Recycle bin disappears from desktop after a while (seems to be a plasma 6 bug)~~
Make new apps and changes/improvements VISIBLE even on older installations. For example, Ashy Terminal, Big Audio Converter, Big Video Converter, JamesDSP, and others are not offered or even visible on Pamac.
Pamac hangs during post-transaction hooks due to biglinux-improve-compatibility hooks: check GitHub issue at https://github.com/biglinux/biglinux-improve-compatibility/issues/16
Consider Mouse Tiler instead of KZones: it edges out for simplicity if you want plug-and-play layouts without JSON fiddling.
There are two in-kernel drivers for RTL8192CU: rtl8xxxu and rtl8192cu, and the second one doesn’t support HT40.
My adapter works fine even without any extra driver as long as I blacklist the rtl8192cu driver by:
sudo sh -c ‘echo blacklist rtl8192cu > /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8192cu.conf’
Or consider a single, fully functional WiFi driver (currently tested up to kernel 7.0.0) instead of a series of fragmented drivers that require updates every time a new kernel is released.
It works for the following chips:
RTL8188CU/CUS/CTV
RTL8188EU/EUS/ETV
RTL8188FU/FTV
RTL8188GU | RTL8188RU
RTL8191CU | RTL8192CU
RTL8192EU | RTL8192FU
RTL8723AU | RTL8723BU
You can find it here:
https://github.com/a5a5aa555oo/rtl8xxxu
And here on the AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rtl8xxxu-dkms-git
Change the Zstandard compression level in btrfs from zstd:5 to zstd:1. You only lose about 2% in compression, but the real gain of zstd:1 is more noticeable on slow CPUs and/or HDDs with intensive writes.
Try it and believe it. I did it by running:
sudo sed -i ‘s/compress-force=zstd:5/compress-force=zstd:1/’ /etc/fstab && sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo mount -o remount,compress-force=zstd:1 /
It would be nice if it was prompted during installation and included in one of your many beautiful graphical tools.

That’s all for now but I reserve the right to further integrate this post if I come across something new.

Nice distro and good team: keep going, you’re on the right path.
Thank you for the effort you have given to this project: your work has finally made Linux great.