BUT IT DOES WORK

When I was checking out some Linux links as part of the updates I’m doing to my LINUX PAGE, I revisited a page called "Why Linux is not ready for the desktop" that I first read years ago.

It was written by a geek called Artem S. Tashkinov, who makes a really full on case that Linux doesn’t work as a desktop operating system, and is not suitable as a replacement for Windows.

It is fully researched and well presented. Mr Tashkinov really seems to know his stuff, and I remember when I originally read it I was fully convinced, so I went back to Windows 7.

He updates the page regularly, and has hundreds of people commenting, who mostly agree with him.

But he is wrong.

He is an experienced computer geek who really knows his stuff (an expert), while I am a clueless numpty who often struggles with the basics. So how on earth can I definitively say he is wrong?

Mainly because of one simple fact. For the past year I have used Linux as my desktop operating system every day, on both my PC and Laptop. I used it to replace Windows and it is not only working, it is generally working well.

Here is a screenshot of my Linux desktop operating system happily working well this morning:

He is not the only person online saying Linux doesn’t work and is unsuitable to replace Windows. There are dozens of YouTube videos essentially saying the same thing, but they don’t have all the research to back them up that Mr Tashkinov does.

But I’m certainly not the only person successfully using Linux as a desktop operating system. As of 2025, Linux-based operating systems now exceed 4% of the global desktop market.

There are estimated to be more than two billion PC’s in 2025, so 4% of that is more than 80 million. That means there are literally MILLIONS of people using Linux as their desktop operating system.

As well as all those PC’s, 100% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world are running on Linux in 2025, which tends to confirm that it must have some good points.

I’m not a geek and have no desire to get into arguments with geeks, because using their thinking methods and playing by their rules, they would shred me.

But as far as I’m concerned, if I’m using Linux as my everyday operating system, and millions of other people are as well, then this argument is done and dusted. Linux does work as a desktop operating system, the proof is right there in plain sight.

So how can these geeks claim otherwise? Personally I think they are deliberately ignoring all the millions of instances of it working, and focusing only on when it doesn’t.

However I’m not about to deny that for non geeks fleeing from Windows, Linux often initially doesn’t work very well, so next I’m going to do a post with 10 common mistakes and how to avoid them.

I’ve done multiple installs of Linux, and on some occasions have not been happy with the results, and have had to start over again. But I've found that by sticking to Linux Mint and avoiding some basic mistakes, it's not that hard to avoid most common Linux problems.

STARTING OVER AGAIN

SIFT LINUX PAGE UPDATE

 

 To help people making the switch to Linux I started compiling my Linux posts into a SIFT LINUX PAGE back in 2024, but it became a jumbled mess and needed a tidy up. So I decided to start over again and make it all as simple as possible. 

One way to simplify things is to have a list of links back to original posts rather than trying to copy and paste them all into one big page.

LINUX POSTS ON THIS BLOG (newest at top) 

 AM I AN IDIOT? - Self doubts about my geek skills 

BTW I USE ARCH - Some memes to troll Linux Arch geeks

WHICH LINUX DISTRO? - I really only recommend two, either Mint or Zorin

ONLINE PRIVACY - A few ways to keep hold of a bit of privacy

TESTING OUT FOSS - There is masses of Free Open Source Software (FOSS)

LINUX NEEDS MORE FILE BROWSERS - My issues with Linux file browsers

RETURNING TO LINUX - Why I quit Windows & moved to Linux

LINUX MISINFORMATION -  Yes, even Linux reviews are full of lies 

 

My Linux info is not aimed at geeks, it's for people who have been using Windows or Apple computers, and want to move to Linux in search of privacy and security, or for ethical reasons.

As with most subjects, with Linux there is far too much complexity and misinformation online, and that is often just confusing rather than helpful.

An ever increasing number of people are now asking about Linux. In the past this was mainly just an idle curiosity, but now they are seriously looking for an alternative to Windows or Apple. 

Linux was originally aimed mainly at geeks and was fairly difficult for regular computer users to come to terms with. When I first tried Linux Ubuntu in 2010, after about a month I gave up and went back to Windows XP.

Back in 2010 I did a page about Linux "LINUX A n00b goes for a test drive" which is still online, but despite having had a quick update in 2016, it's mostly out of date now.

With the benefit of hindsight, Windows XP was actually a pretty good operating system, as were Windows 2000 and Windows 7. But things have really changed since those days, and Microsoft are no longer even trying to hide their evil intentions.

For me Windows ended with Windows 7. Windows 11 is full on spyware and Microsoft is clearly aiming to build an AI operating system monitoring everything you do, meanwhile Apple is moving in the same direction, so sooner or later I think anyone who wants any privacy on a computer will have to move to Linux 

These days, some of the Linux Operating systems (Distros) are pretty good, as they have been slowly progressing, while Windows has been relentlessly going backwards since Windows 7.  

Like many people I had been complaining for years about Microsoft, but there reached a point where I had to admit that I had no future with Microsoft, so would need to do whatever it took to move on. 

(This is a screenshot of my desktop, and it's pretty cool really - It's Linux Mint which is my favourite Linux distro)

Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 in October 2025, and ramped up their efforts to push the even more appalling Windows 11, with its built in advertising, and full blown spyware (Recall) taking constant screenshots of your desktop and sending them back to Microsoft. 

I'm expecting that even non security minded Windows users are finally going to start having issues with this level of spying.

SOME HANDY LINUX LINKS (sorted alphabetically) 

 A n00b goes for a test drive - My own original page about Linux from 2010

Distrowatch - A great introduction and overview of Linux distros

Libre Office - My pick for best replacement for Microsoft Office 

Linux Mint - My own daily driver & favourite distro

Linux Zorin - A stylish & highly recommended distro

TECMINT - Information about Linux stuff

AM I AN IDIOT?

The sad truth is that while some people do see me as some sort of computer geek, I actually find a lot of this stuff endlessly confusing and a real struggle to sort out.
 

The reason I have such carefully organised systems is that it’s the only way I can get my head around the things I’m trying to do, and even with all my systems, I’m constantly getting confused or stuck.

Yesterday I was unable to log into any of my files and was starting to stress out, until I finally realised that I’d accidentally hit the caps lock on my keyboard, and that was why my passwords were all wrong.

That is a fairly easy mistake to make – does everyone else do that too or am I a lone idiot?

I’m trying to organise hundreds of thousands of files, and to maintain reasonable privacy, backups, and security, while also having switched to using Linux full-time a year ago, after using Windows for a quarter of a century.

People talk about switching to Linux as if it’s a quick and easy swap that only takes a few hours. I tried out half a dozen distros before choosing one, and have now spent more than a year having to sort out relatively minor but really awkward problems like external drives and USB sticks not working because of them being formatted wrong.

On top of that there are things like switching from Photoshop to GIMP… It might be easy for a real geek, but I find this stuff fairly difficult.

The thing that has caused me the most problems on both Linux and Windows is trying to share or sync files between different devices using cloud storage. That has caused all sorts of muck ups for years

When I see other people’s computer systems I have no idea how they manage to do anything at all. I’m constantly finding all this geek stuff really confusing, and barely a day goes by without me asking the question – “Am I an idiot?”

I think I’m a mid level computer user trying to avoid falling into systems of normie digital mind control, (like Windows or Google) and in some ways that seems to keep getting harder. But it keeps me on my toes, and I do seem to be slowly progressing.
 

MY INNER PARROT

Sometimes people talk about their inner guides, as if they are delicate soft spoken little wallflowers, hard to even hear, let alone to understand what they are trying to say.

Five days ago I woke up with a voice like an angry parrot in my head, telling me to get my arse off the internet.

I made a pretty solid compromise and decided to cut my internet time back to a maximum of one hour each day, and I have indeed been doing that. But each evening as I fire up my countdown timer to time my daily internet time, it seems like quite a rush to get the basics done.

I was half expecting my inner parrot to say something like “It’s OK to use the internet for longer if you have a specific reason, as long as you don’t waste time surfing”.

But no, today my inner parrot is saying “One hour is more than enough, cut back all the crap you are doing". I have already cut out most of the crap, but I can’t argue with my inner parrot. I suspect any blog posts I do will not be long winded epic masterpieces (I’m already writing them offline, but don’t have much spare time to post them).

It’s not always this clear, but whatever sense of intuition I have really seems to have had enough of the internet at the moment.

FIRST DAY OF LIMITED INTERNET

I was expecting to be hanging out to see online stuff, especially cryptos, after nearly 24 hours with no internet, but the truth is I didn’t even really want to plug in the connection and felt relieved not to be looking at all that crap.

I never even did a half hour session to try that out, but instead decided to make it only one internet session a day, for a maximum of one hour.

I didn’t seem to suffer the cravings of an addiction withdrawal, but more like the relief of removing a butt plug (I presume).

 

When I finally did get around to doing my hour of internet in the evening, I was quite excited to start my timer and see how it would go. It was fine, and I got all the essentials done.

Next I'm planning to do an internet checklist to help me whiz through all my more essential internet jobs in one hour each day without forgetting any.

Quick blog post, tick! 

 

 

INTERNET FREEDOM

Information overload has long been an ongoing problem, but this year it seems even more excessive than usual. Despite being totally burned out from the endless inflow of data, I seem to be compelled to keep looking at it, endlessly searching for the missing link. 

At the start of this week I decided to make some positive changes, and I could see straight away where most of my flow of exhausting negative input was coming from, but I have always seemed to avoid facing up to it.

The internet is my main problem. It can be a very useful tool, but it’s starting to feel like a giant sewage pipe pumping crap straight into my mind, and for some reason I have become addicted to that inflow. 

Today I woke up with a new plan to put the internet back in it’s place as a tool, and stop it taking over my life. It’s a very basic plan that only took about two seconds to implement.

Before starting up my computer I unplugged the internet connection. My plan is to leave the internet unplugged most of the time, and also to permanently stop using WIFI.

 

I now have a digital timer on my desk, set to one hour. That is the maximum amount of time I want to spend connected to the internet on any given day. So when I plug my internet connection back in and start my timer, it’s safe to say I won’t have much time to piss about looking at distractions like YouTube or Facebook.

And if anything is going to take up much time, I plan to download it and look at it offline, or in the case of something like a blog post, to write it offline, and then quickly upload it during my connected time.

MY AI AUDIENCE

 Blogging can be very confusing at times. Despite saying I was only posting stuff for myself and ignoring the hits, I must admit that I do keep having a peak at the hit count.

As I've mentioned once or twice, my old Wordpress blog www.frot.co.nz used to get about 1000 hits a day in 2019, prior to the covidhoax, but during convid those hits all dried up and it went down to about 100 hits a day.

For some reason I always assumed that those 1000 hits were real people, and Google managed to stop 90% of them in 2020 by black listing my site. But I may have been barking up the wrong tree there.

On my newer www.sift.co.nz Blogger blog I've tried a couple of experiments and it has slowly dawned on me that quite possibly most of my audience is AI, and most likely always has been.

My new blog was only getting about 300 hits a day, but when I had a month off in May this year, and didn't post anything, after a few weeks the hits rose to more like 800 a day. Then when I started posting daily again, after a few weeks they dropped back down to around 400 a day.

Perplexed, I left it a month and repeated the month off experiment in July.  This time the hits rose from around 400, up to over 900, after a few weeks of posting nothing. Then after going back to diligently doing a post every day for a few weeks, my hits gradually declined again.

Two possibilities I came up with: Firstly it may be that my posts are such complete bullshit that the more I post the less people look at my blog. That is possible, but it also requires that the less I post the more hits my blog gets. And that second part seems unlikely.

My next idea is that most internet traffic is AI, and traffic flows are being used to shape content. If I'm not posting anything on my Blogger blog, Google (who own Blogger) want to encourage me to keep the blog alive, so they increase my traffic to make posting seem more worthwhile. 

But if I'm regularly posting, Google, who actively dislike my content, reduce the hits, in an attempt to drive me to post more approved content. I haven't actually ever tried doing that on Blogger, but I have tried it on a Facebook account, and yes, an inoffensive FB account does do much better in the algorithms.

 

And then the penny dropped - on blogs, video sharing platforms, social media, and indeed the entire internet, what if the "traffic" is not humans, but is mostly AI?. By "mostly" I don't mean about half, which is a widely accepted figure in 2025, but more like well over 90%.

If almost all internet traffic is AI, on the internet we have already been replaced by bots. While I thought bots had blacklisted my content and stopped a human audience from seeing it, what if almost all my hits were AI in the first place, and all the bots did was stop pretending to look at it?.

It's becoming increasingly clear that a huge amount of content is now being produced by AI, especially on platforms like YouTube. But what we were failing to see that most of the audience was AI all along. So everything we post had just better be primarily for our own entertainment, because bugger all real people are looking at it! 

BRAVE SEARCH

The brave search engine was recommended to me so I gave it a quick test - is it any good? - no, it's utter crap like all the others - they are all providing only selected approved content, it just depends who's AI is doing the approving. 

I do use the Brave browser as my default internet browser, and it's pretty good. I'd actually rather have Floorp, the Japanese Firefox privacy fork as my default, but sometimes I find a Chromium based browser works better, so I tend to swap back and forth between Brave and Floorp, leaving both browsers open all day.

 

But honestly, I gave the Brave search engine a few tries, thought it was hopeless, and soon went back to swapping between Yandex and DuckDuckGo. They are both far from perfect, but I've come to think that there is no such thing a one size fits all search engine, just avoid Google like the plague!.

Here is an example - trying out DuckDuckGo, vs Brave, vs Yandax, by asking if "Michelle Obama" is a transvestite. Obviously he is, because Michael Robinson is a man, so search censorship doesn't get much more blatant than this example.

 

 DuckDuckGo is my basic go to search engine in most browsers - it's there ready to go, it's better than the appalling Google, and it sort of works. But showing it here displaying propaganda from "Snopes" as it's first answer reveals what utter crap DuckDuckGo actually is.

 

Next, how did Brave compare? It's even more useless, just coming up with a moronic AI approved narrative response and showing itself to a complete waste of space.

 

As expected Yandex was far more helpful, it included lots of pictures of Michael Robinson's cock sticking out the front of his dress, and didn't try to brush this huge white elephant under the carpet. 

Yandex is generally a far better search engine for finding any non approved content, as long as it doesn't involve secrets about Russia! 

 

DISCONNECTED CONNECTIONS

Is anything on the internet real? Some days I have a look around online, and really start to wonder. It was back in October 1997 that I got my first computer with a modem, so next month will be my 27th anniversary of using the internet.

I took to the internet like a duck to water, and have used the internet nearly every day ever since. It almost seems essential, like eating or sleeping. I know it isn't, but I still feel like I really need everyday access to a computer with an internet connection.

 

Cell phones on the other hand, I've never felt that way about. After a PC, the next tech thing I got was a cell phone, in 1998, but I soon started to hate the damn thing, and thought it was a complete pain in the arse. 

For about five years I kept getting replacement Nokia 3110 phones whenever they had pre-pay special offers, but I always used them as little as possible.

 

After about five years of reluctantly owning cell phones I eventually said "sod this for a joke, cell phones suck" and just stopped having one altogether for about 15 years. These days I do have one, a 2018 Samsung Galaxy Note 9 pre-pay, that I top up once a year, but seldom carry and almost never use.

 

Despite being an antisocial prick, I do like to have a look at Facebook most days, and I also have a strange compulsion to write daily blog posts. And it's the ever increasing activity on these two platforms that is making me wonder what is going on this year.

For a while, back around 2018, my blog www.frot.co.nz was quite popular, getting around 1500 hits a day, but during the covidhoax it got absolutely hammered (including being blacklisted by Google) and the hits dropped right back to only about 100 a day, so I gradually gave up on it in 2023, and at the start of 2024 switched to only posting on my new www.sift.co.nz blog.

For the first year, my new blog also got very little traffic, only getting about 200 hits a day throughout 2024, but in 2025 the traffic started increasing, and the strange thing is that over the past few months it has now started getting up over 1500 views on some days.
 

So my blog now seems to recovering back up to the previous levels of traffic that disappeared about five years ago. Why would that be? And is this traffic actual real people, or just AI traffic? I quite like the idea that more people are reading things I post online, but my impression is that the entire internet is being increasingly controlled.

I may be deluding myself here, but I like to believe that the deep state still wants to bury my content and try to hide it from as many people as possible. So this recent increase in traffic has me quite perplexed. 

At this stage I don't have a solid hypothesis, one guess is that they (Google/The deep state) are using AI to give an impression of increasing traffic, when in reality I'm probably only getting about 200 views a day. But why would they give a toss if a noddy nobody like me thinks my blog is popular?