BigLinux offers numerous desktop layouts, such as this OSX-like take.
ZDNET/Jack Wallen
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- BIgLinux is free and available for installation on as many computers as you need.
- It’s big, beautiful, and offers more helpful features than the operating system you’re currently using.
- It should be far more popular than it is.
I thought I’d seen them all and worked with every distribution available. Even so, I poke around, every day, to see if there’s something new to be had. Color me surprised when I ran into a Linux distribution that has been around for nearly two decades and I’d never known about.
That distribution is BigLinux. Hailing from Brazil (localized into Brazilian Portuguese with support for English), this flavor of Linux was originally based on Kubuntu but eventually re-born with a base of Deepin. Soon after that, it added more desktop environments, until it resembled that of ZorinOS (allowing users to select a desktop layout of their choice).
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But back in 2021, BigLinux made another shift, migrating to Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma as a base. And, with KDE Plasma as its primary desktop, it still allows you to select your layout (from a vanilla KDE Plasma to a rather OS X-like desktop and everything in between.
BigLinux wants to be everything to you: from gaming, productivity, task automation, entertainment, communication and so much more. Sounds like just about any operating system on the planet, right? Well, BigLinux does have a few tricks up its sleeve to distance itself from the usual, mundane OS.
For example, you get web applications (such as Amazon Music, Deezer Music, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Jitsi Meet, Messenger, Netflix, Outlook, all of the Google apps, and more) out of the box. You’ll find dozens of applications that take up very little space on your drive.
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You also get to choose the web browser to be installed and used by default (from Brave, Firefox, Google Chrome, Chromium, Vivaldi, LibreWorlf, Opera, or Falkon), sync your phone (with KDE Connect), install drivers with the Big Driver Manager, reduce ambient noise from your online calls and recordings (with the help of neural network techniques).
There are plenty of included web apps to use out of the box.
ZDNET/Jack Wallen
BigLinux is also optimized to facilitate easier game installation (and includes Steam out of the box). You’ll also get remote access, restore points, automatic file compression, Android apps (thanks to Waydroid), and so much more.
Yeah, BigLinux has a lot to offer. In fact, I was surprised at just how much there was to find.
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On top of that, it’s quite an elegant desktop. I opted to test the OS X-like layout, which presents with a bottom dock, a top “menu bar,” and a user-friendly, searchable main menu.
Forgetting BigLinux had migrated to Manjaro Linux, I opened the terminal window to test the installation of apps from the command line. With my memory skipping a beat, I first ran, sudo apt-get update, only to be reminded that pacman is the default package manager. However, the developers thought of this eventuality and added a wrapper that would connect apt to pacman and run just fine. I was then able to install applications like this:
or
sudo apt-get install opera
