TESTING OUT FOSS

For the past year I've been mainly using Linux Mint as my daily driver, but sometimes returning to Windows 7 when I want to use Photoshop. 

My laptop is running Mint Cinnamon 21 (a two year old version from July 2022), while my PC is set up with the latest version, Mint 22, which was released in July 2024. Part of the Linux learning curve is choosing which software to use from a huge range of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) available on Linux. 

I'm trying out all sorts of programs and this is what my laptop looks like at the moment - so much software to try out! Once I decide which option I like best I uninstall the other options that I won't be using.

 I'm running a tighter ship on my PC and not installing or testing as much new software. There is really not much of a difference between Mint 21 & 22. One of the things I like about Mint is that they don't change much with each new release, just gradually refining things rather than trying to be spectacular. 

I tried out about half a dozen Linux distros and Mint Cinnamon was my pick. Other distros I liked were Mint LMDE & Zorin 17. What I'm looking for in a distro is simplicity, reliability, & a user interface resembling Windows 7. And no geek stuff or use of command line.

I'm not a fan of Ubuntu and expect at some point in the future to be switching to the Mint Debian Edition in order to escape the woke clutches of Ubuntu. Clearly Mint are preparing themselves for that day.

 https://www.linuxmint.com/

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint

LINUX NEWB PAGE

Several of my friends have been asking about Linux lately. In the past it was mainly just an idle curiosity, but now it is a serious alternative to Windows. In the past Linux was aimed mainly at geeks and was difficult for regular computer users to come to terms with. When I first tried Linux in 2010, I soon gave up and went back to Windows XP.

As of 2025 some of the Linux Operating systems (Distros) are pretty good, as they have been slowly progressing, while Windows has been going backwards since Windows 7. 

In 2025 Microsoft will be ending support for Windows 10 and ramping up their efforts to push their Windows 11 full blown spyware operating system with "Recall" taking constant screenshots of your desktop and sending them back to Microsoft. I'm expecting that even non security minded Windows 10 users are going to start having concerns about this level of spying.

Anticipating that this year I'm going to be trying to help more people make the switch to Linux I've started compiling all my Linux notes and blog posts into one big "LINUX NEWB" page on my blog.

The page is an ongoing work in progress and in 2025 I plan to continue adding a copy of anything I post that is Linux related to it as I go. New content will be added at the top. I'll mainly be focused on Linux Mint because that is the distro I use.

 

 I'll also get into some of the open source software I'm testing out such as the Japanese privacy browser Floorp which is a cleaned out fork of Firefox

COMPUTING WAS A DEEP STATE SET UP

At some point in the past few years, the penny dropped and I realised  Apple, Microsoft, and Google, were all set up by the deep state, they were never real businesses – we can use their tools, but they are all playing us.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both actors working for the CIA. Jobs faked his death and Gates was replaced around 2013. As was “Melinda” who is a very obvious tranny. “Bill” probably is as well – they appear to be inverts.

Linux – is there is something not right about the development and marketing of Linux? – by keeping it hard to use and underground for decades it has never posed a real threat to the deep state operating systems. It slowly improves, but is never really sorted out for mass use. Maybe it’s always been too controlled by geeks, but some distros, like Mint, are so close to being suited to mass use, I always wonder what is holding everything back? Has the deep state infiltrated Linux development too and deliberately held it back?

All those Windows software updates are not just for copying our data, one day all of those programs could “unexpectedly” create irritating and time consuming problems in unison – mass distraction at a key moment, and those trojans are being constantly set up.

Logging us out of accounts and demanding that we SUBMIT (rather than just logging back in) is obvious mind programming. Any site that does that has revealed it’s true intentions. Pay attention to these little signs!

Another trick is spell checkers. Making spell checkers only work properly in US English has forced us to use US spelling – more programming. But it’s not just our computers that are trying to control us, nearly everything on the internet is a distraction, whether intentional or not, and social media is almost all just there to distract us – that is a major part of how we are being controlled.

Microsoft crossed the line after Win 7 – Microsoft is all spyware but I don’t ever want to use Win 10 on, not even for day to day use and certainly not for anything to do with cryptos. What I’m using on my computers these days is both Windows 7 and Linux Mint 20, but I’m gradually moving more to Linux and less Windows. I’m not a tech geek and having used Windows 98, XP, and 7, for quarter of a century, I do find it a stretch fully escaping the clutches of Microscum, mainly because of things like changing from Photoshop to Gimp.

Mint is a decent operating system though, and Gimp is pretty good too. It wasn’t a good situation being locked into old software. Photoshop CS6 (2012) was the last version that you can use without having to rent it off Adobe for a monthly fee, which I would never do, so I was using an 11 year old program that I would never update. Same with Windows 7 (2009).

MICROSOFT IS SPYWARE

As of 2024, over 95% of Microsoft users were using spyware crap 

These are some recent figures for Microsoft operating system usage - it blows me away that over 95% of Microsoft users are using Windows 10 or 11!

Microsoft ended for me at Win 7 (I refuse to use any newer Microsoft operating systems) and I'm mainly using Linux Mint now. Linux is far from perfect, and I suspect that the big players are doing their best to infiltrate Linux at every level and sabotage it's development from the inside. 

But with Windows 11, Microsoft has gone next level spyware, and I hope that more normies start to wake up this year. Windows 10 is spyware, but Windows 11 is deep state fist up sphincter data control. 2025 is a good time to wake up, it's only a decade too late...

 

LINUX NEEDS MORE FILE BROWSERS

Don't panic, I'm just kidding. Linux doesn't really need any more file browsers, it already has at least 32. What it needs are some more that are as good as the ones that come standard on Windows.

 This seems to be an issue that Linux developers have been refusing to address for decades. As a Windows user switching to Linux, I think it's one of the big issues that send so many Microsoft refugees straight back to Windows. Most Linux file browsers suck...

This is the process I went through looking for a good file browser when I was trying out some different Linux distros. Articles like this one proudly proclaim "there are 32 options for Linux file browsers" but I actually tried out about half of them (the others were mainly total geek stuff such as command line based ones, so clearly not what I was looking for), and there was only one I liked that did everything I wanted - NEMO (Which is the default file browser on both Linux Mint & Linux Zorin). 

 

 

There was actually only one other file browser I liked (Dolphin, the default file browser on KDE distros), but even that had an issue I would need to sort out before I could use it (it didn't display my PCloud drive), and I thought most of the others were completely hopeless. 

 

 

In fact there were less than half a dozen that I even thought were almost as good as the default file browser on Windows XP (Yes, XP from 2001!) but as with many things, this elephant in the Linux room seems to go unnoticed by most geeks.

 

The fact that it was Linux Mint that developed the Nemo file browser, thereby fixing the glaring hole that has made Linux all but unusable for non geeks for decades, was another aspect of what convinced me Mint is the best Linux distro.

 

 

I have over a 1/4 million files and the Nemo file browser is the main program that enabled me to switch to using Linux. Without a decent file browser I would be completely lost on Linux.