A novice here asking a question. Skip the following paragraph if not interested in irrelevant backstory

A novice here asking a question. Skip the following paragraph if not interested in irrelevant backstory.

Long story short I got a laptop for university and decided to go balls deep and install a linux distro without trying it out on a VM. Firstly, tried ubuntu which was the worst decision in my life. Compatibility issues and overall disgust made me switch to something else. This time it was Linux Mint. I am very happy with the distro, it is perfectly compatible with my Dell Latitude, no errors, all keys responsive and the cinnamon DE looks great.

Now to the question. What is the actual purpose of the terminal for a normie user like me? I know you can access directories, create files, monitor stats and install software but you can do the exact same thing using software and package manager and navigate using a mouse and a keyboard.

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As much as you want. If you are interested in scripting or ricing or whatever it becomes a necessary tool. It can be really fun and more efficient than guis by a mile (have to rename a bunch of files based on their previous names/md5s etc)

but user everyone knows the main purpose of the terminal is to run screenfetch

>What is the actual purpose of the terminal for a normie user like me?
Actually, terminal is much more efficient and you can automate long tasks.

Can I get some useful links and tutorials on ricing and task automation? Sounds interesting

>tfw I'm in natural language processing and exclusively marked the phrase "long story short' to be the introduction to a long body of irrelevant text and it werks so far

But no if you're using mint and never need to install something out of the repo's you can stay le entirely terminal free

Take
mysqldump --add-drop-table --extended-insert --force --log-error=error.log -uUSER -pPASS OLD_DB_NAME | ssh -C user@newhost "mysql -uUSER -pPASS NEW_DB_NAME"

Now try the same thing as efficiently in a GOOEY.

But Software Managers are used
>to install something out of the repo's
So why even bother?

To me personally it would take a couple hours to figure out what the script means and does. Then I'd need like a week to memorize the code so I can comfortably type it up and execute it. Doesn't sound very efficient.

for an average pleb that is not a unix wizard I'd say "much more efficient" is rather overstated. you could delete an important file with a single typo and end up spending hours trying to recover it. a normie probably doesn't need to know beyond mv, cp, rm -rf --no-preserve-root /, git, and sudo apt-get.

Learn bash, look it up

It's about learning the patterns and using them on a regular basis. Knowing what to expect for a given input is important as well.
Obviously, if you're starting out you're not going to be efficient.

Thanks for the answers. It is very surprising to see Sup Forums being helpful and acting civilized.

you're welcome. now install gentoo.

Ha, I didn't even know
Using the terminal makes a lot of stuff easier tho if you're used to it, but yeah no reason to make that priority if you can do everything just fine without it hehe

post of the day

Using a terminal and doing "maintenance" of any kind is autistic dropout circlejerk bullshit past 2005. Outside of programmatically manipulating files, there's nothing really there for you.

An OS is supposed to do all this itself and you don't have to think about it, leaving you more time to make money.

What you see on Sup Forums and desktop threads is terminal autism, they have it open because a meme started where they think they're being intelligent by passingly impressing normies by using a terminal to do everything. Reason why is because everyone that does this knows that they have no hope of any kind of income besides welfare. You are not "missing out" on some kind of hidden power, it's just losers jacking each other off.

Before it happens, you also won't want to do the same for distro hopping, especially if as you say everything is working.

>university

You probably walk around and see some 30 year old who was in your 101 class and walked out and then he butt diddles in the corner for 6-8 hours straight. Those are the arch spergs and the ones who are probably in the desktop threads jerking off.

lole well you're making a bit of a drama here, I'm using devuan and I need the terminal quiet often. Even if you don't need it some basic knowledge of how to use it is gonna make your linux life a lot easier. You're right tho about the autism. All the meme stuff isn't as important as everyone makes it look like and if you're not interested in the OS and just want ur stuff to werk there's absolutely no use in learning all the 'power user' bs

There are many programs that don't have a gui, and must be run from the terminal. It's also extremely helpful for searching though several gigabyte text documents. Opening these in a non-specialized gui could crash your system.

Also, there's a pattern to the terminal that all programs must follow, guis require a stronger learning curve every first time

Terminal is great for everything that's repetitive work, like for example copying every file that ends with .png or .jpg and renaming it after it's download date. Or maybe you have a huge list of some shit you need to process into something use able, so you just write a one liner to do it, like split that list at each whitespace, put it into a table, take only the 3rd column and average all those numbers there.

It's like programming except your standard library is every program that exists on linux and you don't need to include or import anything.

If you don't have experience in programming, automation, just regular bash, or anything like that, it is usually unhelpful because you don't know what to do. Once you start understanding what certain things do and how, bash becomes much more efficient than any GUI for most everyday computer things that aren't in a web browser

>What is the actual purpose of the terminal for a normie user like me?

That's the operating system. The desktop environment is slapped on top.

Some people actually enjoy using computers. Why are you here?

Theres a good 3 part tutorial for i3 on youtube.
youtu.be/j1I63wGcvU4

>I know you can access directories, create files, monitor stats and install software but you can do the exact same thing using software and package manager and navigate using a mouse and a keyboard.
Use a file manager then?

>An OS is supposed to do all this itself and you don't have to think about it, leaving you more time to make money.

Windows requires a sysadmin (which might just be you) and a lot command line is needed (sfc /scannow anyone?). Chkdsk can be done in a gui now.

Apple requires a lot of money to make said money.

If either of these systems works for someone that's great.

I don't use the terminal in linux that much. Just updating. Hit the up arrow and your last command is there for you. Using it doesn't mean anything. Linux takes some time to learn but for some it's a hobby and that also leads to a better running machine.

If your area of "expertise" ended up falling anywhere into the operating system level, you have failed, and you are doing pretend "computer science". Nobody cares how cool your obscure distro is, or how close you stuck to a paradigm from the mid 60s, they care what your site or app offers to them. Mentioning that it is a "hobby" is defeatism and is a byword for "not serious". Outside of the money, jacking off in a terminal is fun a couple of times but when you deliver the data your client needed to them much better than they could even theoretically think it out, that's a much bigger high.

I hope this has answered your question, OP. Look for these hippie dropout buzzwords: sane, elegant, hobby, lore, pure. Say any of these and you're sure to be pissing away decades straight down the toilet.

what ur income

> Ubuntu had compatibility problems
> Mint, identical to Ubuntu below the desktop, did not

4/10 almost had me

With Ubuntu my screen would go all black after doing a suspend or closing the lid. I would then have to killall to get back to login screen. Tried fixing the issue using various scripts and gpu driver updates which gave no results. Mint was a complete blessing.