Someone asked me, why did I chose BigLinux as my OS of choice in everything I do, so I said …
I have installed and tested over 15 OSes on my computer in the last few years. I never intended to do that, all I wanted to do was abandon the Microsoft/PRISM/CIA/FBI OS for something else that wouldn’t try to price gouge me or spy on my every bowel movement.
I tried some off-the-wall OSes like OpenIndiana, Haiku, and Deepin. I thought Deepin 25 was great until I bricked the system trying to install the programs I wanted or needed, and having no idea of how to properly do that. It was an impossible task because it was China-based and offered predominately Chinese programs in it store-front. So after I bricked Deepin, I went on a long trip, not knowing where I was going and where I would eventually wind up…
I tried MX Linux, Kubuntu, Parrot, Solus, KDE Neon, Open Suse, Q4OS, Mint, PCLinuxOS, and PikaOS, but none of them were perfect. For example, in Kubuntu I set the file association for pdfs to PDF-XChange Editor, yet when I left-clicked on a pdf file, PDF-XChange Editor opens, but it is blank instead of opening the file I clicked on. Was this a minor problem? Not if you are new to Linux. For more advanced users they know they have to navigate to the Wine submenu and open “Edit Application…” and set “Program” in the Application tab to read “wine %F”. Simple, eh? Again no, not if you are beginner.
It’s easy to find flaws in things, so I quickly noticed that some OSes were more user-friendly than others, and that getting help for any problems was sometimes blocked by a hostile forum (two forums were hostile). I don’t care that much about forums, so I could overlook that, but still … if the forum admins were hostile, what kind of OS would they put together? A user-unfriendly OS?
Yet every OS I looked at had some kind of flaw in them, and MSWindows was no exception. So I learned to stop searching for the perfect OS because that seemed an impossible task. Rather I learned to search for the best implemented OS, one in which the good would outweigh the bad, yet I still believed that even that philosophy was a little too unrealistic … until one day I came across BigLinux.
When I first heard of BigLinux, I dismissed it because it was advertised as a Portuguese-oriented OS for the state of Brazil, and I was American English. Yet as my search for the best implemented OS continued, my choices of a suitable OS were dwindling fast. One day as I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, I carefully reread the description of all OSes in DistroWatch, whether they sounded appealing or not, and I realized that BigLinux wasn’t anything like what I first thought it was like.
So to make a short story long, what does BigLinux have that literally none of the other OSes has all in one place?
1) Past experience has taught me that I didn’t want an OS that I had to change out every three years. I have always wanted a computer that I buy and run it until it dies, and never be forced to reinstall anything. BigLinux is a running release so that problem is solved.
2) As a developer, I wanted an up-to-date system, and BigLinux does that through it’s running release system. MX Linux was stuck for years at a very early version of GTK4, far behind the latest version, but BigLinux had the very latest from the very start which allows me to stay ahead of the game.
3) As a noobie, I didn’t want an update that would force me to have to reinstall or patch anything. If that ever happens with Big Linux, they give you a very easy way to rollback updates until they can get it fixed. Extremely few other OSes do that, and do that so easily and simply, and that makes the one-button rollback a huge bonus.
4) Steam and Lutris are preinstalled. Having Lutris preinstalled made it easy to move on to the next step, which was to solve problems with running certain Steam games. I would have never tried Lutris and get know what a life-saver it could be it it hadn’t been preinstalled.
5) Built-in webapp and flatpak support that actually is supported very well (like for easily setting permissions for flatpaks). Also, I’m not restricted to just webapps or flatpaks, I have a huge choice of programs, which is something my experience with other non-Debian OSes did not have. Wow!
6) Smartphone integration. Again, another thing I would have never considered installing without a lot of research of how to do that and make it work, but BigLinux has made this easy.
7) BigLinux comes with AI preinstalled but disabled, giving me a choice if I want AI, and I will never want any AI on my computer. So that was a respectful thing for them to do instead of forcing onto me like quite of few other OSes do.
So BigLinux is an OS I can give to either my grandma or my grandchildren, because it can do anything they need right out-of-the-box. Sure I would have to hold her/their hands for the first few weeks, but I would have to do that anyways for MSWindows, so I uninstall MSWindows and install BigLinux, and it works even for grandmas like no other OS can even come close to doing.
Good work all of you people who helped make BigLinux possible! You have far exceeded my expectations. I was ready to settle down with MX Linux, despite all its shortcomings, but now I have an OS that is better than anything Apple or Microsoft or most any other Linux-based OS would ever dream of making, and it does it without ever invading my privacy.
Muito obrigado, BigLinux!
