I can smell them like at a 1m distance. They smell bad. The first time I realized what they smell like, I took a bite of a muffin that I left on the counter. I tasted the muffin and another bad flavor so I looked and it had ants. From that moment I could smell them, not because I couldn’t smell them before but because now I knew what they smelled like.
It’s an expression. In this context Elon is the broken clock and saying desktops should run Linux is one of the rare times he’s been right about something.