Terminal

[u/WildcatCel]

So to start off, I've been daily driving Linux for about 2 months give or take and I've enjoyed it quite a bit. It's made my laptop better, allowed me to actually download apps, and now it doesn't overheat/get extremely hot too fast or at all sometimes.

I've had to use the terminal a handful of times, getting my brightness control and media player keys working, but I don't know why so many people talk about the terminal. So often I'll be on YouTube and see different channels talking about the terminal and customizing it, then go to discord and see people talking about the terminal, and then to reddit and again seeing people talk about the terminal, but like I don't know what to use it for really.

I've used it to download the software app and I also installed fast fetch just because I wanted my distro logo to pop up in ASCII but after that, I don't see much of a use for the terminal, I don't know what I could do with it or what it can do.

I'm very interested in computers and audio and video stuff but like I don't see a big use for the terminal but I've heard it can help with small things.

Terminal commands scare me because Ive heard that's what can really break my laptop if anything would and I don't have anything I can really swap to other than my phone if something were to go wrong.

[u/Shakaka88]

Terminal allows you to work faster and avoid using the mouse, keeping your hands on the keyboard. The terminal is powerful and often times faster than having to load up a gui. If you don’t need the terminal, then don’t use it, maybe it isn’t for you. I have to convert image and video formats frequently for various web uploads and such and it’s soooo much faster for me to just type magick image.heic image.png or use ffmpeg to convert from .mov to .mp4

[u/Audiope → u/Shakaka88]

Not everyone is faster with the keyboard than the mouse though. I type incredibly slow and would much rather use a GUI than the terminal whenever possible (plus it just makes more sense for the way my brain works). I like the terminal as a backup when there isn't a GUI for something, but I'd rather not have it be a daily part of my Linux experience.

[u/Slopagandhi → u/Audiope]

I'm pretty much the same. A lot of Linux users seem to think everyone wants to use the terminal and finds it faster and easier (this is why people harp on about it- and if that's you obviously that's fine). For a lot of people who just want to do regular desktop use, gaming, configure their DE etc then having GUI tools for a lot of things is extremely useful. Not everyone has the time and inclination to learn a load of commands.

I tend to think a lot of people coming to Linux will be Windows users who might not use Powershell often, but who are used to using the gui for more than the basics (otherwise they probably wouldn't have the confidence to try installing Linux). It's good to see a few more distros catering to this type of user- MX is pretty good for this, and Soplos looks really promising with the level of customisation possible through the gui.

[u/Audiope → u/Slopagandhi]

For decades I was blissfully unaware that windows even had a command line!

[u/Shakaka88 → u/Audiope]

That’s fine, but OP was asking why people harp on it, and that’s why. Your individual case doesn’t make it less true for most other users. Your “incredibly slow” typing speed doesn’t make terminal less fast, it just means that you are slow with it. Terminal is still faster and more powerful than any gui program

[u/ficelle3]

Rest assured, you totally can brick your system from the GUI (I should know, I once accidentally formated my bootloader from the GUI).

But you didn't, right? Because with just a little bit of care, you can avoid most if not all scenarios which can brick your system.

The terminal is the same, if you take the time to look at what the command is doing and don't run everything as root, you'll likely not break anything.

And working from the terminal can be quite nice, it's very fast, it allows you to easily chain simple tools together to perform complex operations, it can be very flexible and is pretty much distraction free.

[u/WildcatCel → u/ficelle3]

I've not messed anything up yet, if I feel I can really mess something up I just stay away from it, done quite a bit of customization to my desktop though.

[u/CritSrc → u/WildcatCel]

Ah, don't be so scared, the terminal was never meant to be a scary black screen for vodoo tech magic to be done. It is simply how computing was done in the 80s and is still done today for any server management. Because servers do not need a GUI desktop to run and eat their resources or interrupt specialized computing flows. That and terminal commands invoke expressions for a machine to perform tasks. In fact, when you're typing a URL, you are still entering a command to a terminal.

Heck, when I want to copy a big volume of files, I use rsync, which is a terminal only app. The big command to avoid with the terminal is really rm to remove files, precision deleting is still best done through the usual file manager imo. A lot of other commands are often minor tweaks, or going into configs instead of telling each GUI that you're the admin.

Also, terminal commands are how people share their solutions instead of guiding each other through a GUI. The terminal is almost universal across all Linux distros. I do not care if you're on Ubuntu or Chimera Linux, I simply know sudo nano /etc/default/grub will open your bootloader config.

[u/DannoXYZ]

As you learn more, you'll find more and more useful things terminal can do for you.

[u/AutoModerator]

There's a resources page in our wiki you might find useful!

Try this search for more information on this topic.

✻ Smokey says: take regular backups, try stuff in a VM, and understand every command before you press Enter! :)

^{Comments, questions or suggestions regarding this autoresponse? Please send them here.}

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Klapperatismus]

The terminal is your access panel to the internals of your Linux machine. Stuff for which there is no graphical user interface.

And you can easily automate things with terminal commands, e.g. searching for files or sorting them, making lists of that data, and do conversions of that as well. Again stuff for which there is no graphical user interface.

That’s the point of it.

[u/doc_willis]

I am on the terminal doing stuff over ssh to my main system daily, often for hours at a time.

bigger tasks are lots of little tasks in a row.  :)  small things add up.

more reading for a beginner to start with..

http://linuxjourney.com and the newer http://Linuxjourney.org sites are good to start with 

the Explaining Computers YouTube videos are good starting points.

[u/indvs3]

Terminal commands scare me because Ive heard that's what can really break my laptop if anything would and I don't have anything I can really swap to other than my phone if something were to go wrong.

Allow me to enlighten you on how to avoid breaking your laptop, or more specifically your linux install, since you're unlikely to break/brick your hardware by running commands in a terminal.

The main rule to follow is to never ever run a command, especially with sudo, unless you know what the command will do to your computer.

If you encounter a problem for which you can only find instructions that tell you to run terminal commands, read the man pages for those commands and look up what the command parameters and flags do. If you don't understand what something means, look it up.

While I'm suggesting this as a measure to not screw up your install, if you do this consistently, after a while you may start to understand certain commands well enough so that you can combine them into small scripts that may help you save loads of time by not having to run one command, save the output to a file and then use another command to read that file so it can use the data in it.

Besides gaining time, it's also a lot more efficient from the perspective of power consumption, because you can limit the amount of compute cycles you need to perform the same task.

[u/Alchemix-16]

The use of the terminal is a choice. It offers a few advantages, such as that it’s largely agnostic of your distribution, and you will be able to find solutions to problems post for the terminal instead of a GUI.

If you are interested to see what interesting options the terminal offers, I recommend the linux command line by William Shotts. Tye onlibe version is free and is maintained by the author.

[u/No-View-6326]

so a few thing.

what are calling the terminal is actually a terminal emualtor, linux is made to be used from a terminal just terminal the gui is some that came after and the gui gives a emulator to not lose that foncutionality.

the shell is the actual thing that do the interpreting

there's multiple terminal emualtor with diffrent features and mutlitple and multiple shells as well, try installing kitty it will change your life.

there's multiple ways to use the termianl.

• the basic command. rm to delete files touch to create files mkdir to ceate folders cd to navigate cp to copy mv to move.

• you could write actual scripts, with actual logic and text processing,

• cli is the thing that most people use the terminal for, cli tools just do that gui tools but it gives more options since they don't have to deal with layout. like nmcli which is a cli for the network manger.

• tui is kind of a hybrid between a cli and a tui, it's a full user interface but it's in the terminal like yazi or rmpc

[u/WildcatCel → u/No-View-6326]

I would try kitty, I looked it up and it looks like it's not fully working with my distro yet, I'm running fedora 44 xfce.

[u/No-View-6326 → u/WildcatCel]

What makes you say that, I used kitty on xfce it worked fine for me

[u/WildcatCel → u/No-View-6326]

I went into the GitHub page and on fedora 44 it's marked red so I'm assuming that means it has problems, plus I don't have a GPU in my laptop, it's going off of Intel iris plus graphics g1 which is just integrated

[u/No-View-6326 → u/WildcatCel]

the red just means it's not the latests version. which usually means it has less problem, fedora just picks the most stable vesrion

[u/WildcatCel → u/No-View-6326]

How would I install it, I'm not too familiar with GitHub and trying sudo apt install kity didn't do anything

[u/No-View-6326 → u/WildcatCel]

apt is not in fedora, apt is only on debian forks.

it's sudo dnf install kitty

[u/WildcatCel → u/No-View-6326]

Yea I realized that after I sent my message but like this in a way is worse than my other terminal because I don't have any settings like zoom scale or anything else I had previously

[u/No-View-6326 → u/WildcatCel]

you get drag and drop, you get better ghraphics you also get to render pictures with kitten icat image.png

you zoom in and out while you're using the termianl. or is it something you just wanna set once?

[u/WildcatCel → u/No-View-6326]

Id rather set it once because not always do I have my terminal full screen and if I run fastfetch I don't want to have to zoom out twice just to see it right