I thought it’d be a pain but installing programs through the terminal is actually so nice, I never would have expected it
Realistically the simplest way to think about it is a text based file manager that can run programs, you could literally ignore it and use it to just install and update, if GUI’s your thing.
I’d use the terminal more if it had better auto suggestions, and allowed me to treat the text like any normal text editor, instead of having to learn keyboard shortcuts just to basic text manipulation. So far Warp terminal is the best option I’ve found
I’m on the other side of the coin, I really don’t know how I’m supposed to learn to use the terminal. I can do sudo apt get to get some programs and updates, as well as mv and cp, but that’s where it stops for me.
You need a purpose. For instance I needed to copy and edit config files for a bunch terminals my company has deployed last week. Instead of manually copying the template directory 80 times and editing the 2 lines that needed to be changed in the parameter file for each one I used powershell to extract the name and id for each terminal from the log files and create copy of the template directory for each one, then replace the terminal name and id in the parameter file of the new directory with the ones extracted from the logs. This would have taken me all day to do manually and it only took about 45 minutes to write up the script and run it. I did have some prior experience with doing this kind of thing but hadn’t tied them all together lile that before so i learned some stuff.
Maybe you need to have some sort of objective before you get started, otherwise yeah, you don’t have much to do in the console :) In my case I only use linux for work, so I’m ssh-ing away and running commands to compile this, apply that, show me the logs for this, grep that, etc.
Wait till you try fish or zsh loaded with all the fancy plugins lol
Oh-My-Zsh (https://ohmyz.sh/) is good if you want to try a nice suite of plugins and dotfiles.
or zoxide and yazi
Could you 'splain it to me? Cuz I installed Mint 3 months ago, totally happy, and I don’t get it.
if I could copy pasta with ctrl-c and ctrl-v in terminal, then 90% of my hatred of the command line would evaporate instantly.
What Ctrl+Shift+(do a little spin)+Ins isn’t intuitive enough for you??
Jokes aside, that’s understandable. I guess I’ve just become used to it, but there must be some way to override the default binding if you don’t like it… Personally I like the kitty terminal’s approach which uses mod+c/v for copy and paste in the terminal like you’d expect, while still leaving ctrl+c/v for sigint and verbatim respectively.
Many terminals let you do that, just change keybinds. The issue is Ctrl+C is used to stop/kill a running command.
middle mouse click is like magic, but CTRL-SHIFT-C/V usually works
I don’t want to pasta with middle click. I want to scroll with middle click. I want to pasta with ctrl-v.
Then change the keyboard shortcuts of your terminal so that it does that. If you can’t, then switch to a terminal that lets you change the keyboard shortcuts.
🤌🤌🤌
Well, yes. But also that only addresses half my comment. I suppose it’s fair since my own comment only addressed half of the previous comment.
Ah, I was so fixated on the “pasta” joke, you’re right, I missed the other thing! Yeah, I can understand you missing that auto scroll feature.
From what I can tell, it doesn’t come as easily as it should natively across all applications, although it appears Firefox has this functionality built in. I found a forum post here from not too long ago. Does this help in your case? :)
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=263528
Edit:
And here, some folks are discussing a scripty way to do it system-wide. YMMV it sounds like, and I’m honestly surprised this isn’t just a tick-box feature by now.
That second link looks promising, it’s more recent than last time I looked into it. Thank you.
Also, I’ve been doing the pasta joke for so long that I forget it’s a bit. “paste” gets autocorrected in my brain to be “pasta”.
Has someone not made this a thing for the terminal?
i like leaving top on all day just to watch it.
you’ve seen top, get ready for btop
I’m the htopopotamus, my processes are bottomless
i’m definitely ready to btop
Niw you are doomed and there is no going back. Welcome to the gang;)
If you or someone you know wants a taste of that experience on Windows, try out winget or chocolatey.
As an administrator, powershell is an essential tool these days. There are tunables that Microsoft simply only exposes via powershell even in their cloud Microsoft 365 environments. Just last month I had to rely on Powershell to trim previous versions on SharePoint, and 2 weeks ago I had to use Powershell to adjust a parameter on Exchange.
But also being able to pop a Powershell session and quickly apply a registry fix or run a diagnostic command or even just install a piece of software without disrupting a user’s work is absolutely brilliant (plus saves a call when I can just email back and say “I’ve pushed it remotely, reboot and it should be sorted now”)
Every time I use Powershell it makes me love bash even more
Yeah Powershell has way more weird limitations than Bash but it’s way better than using cmd.exe
Great news, you can install powershell as your linux shell!
honestly if they made windows terminal available in linux, i’d use it in a heartbeat.
What’s it got that Ptyxis doesn’t?
Why though?
I actually had to do that due to something preventing me from upgrading to Powershell 7 on my workstation. Adapted my script for Linux and ran it in Powershell in Linux
Haha this feels like the software version of using like 3 different daisy-chained adaptors. Nice solve!
As a sometimes Windows admin, I completely agree. Plus so many things that become simple one-liners instead of taking forever farting around in a GUI tool where a little misclick screws up everything and documentation requires 27 pages of giant screenshots.
Every now and then I have to analyze some data at work, and gladly I have full access to my work station, so I have WSL2 with Linux, and I wouldn’t know what to do without all that Linux CLI goodness. A mixture of Pipes, xsltproc, jq, Python to get the numbers out of millioons of log lines or xml or json files. If I was stuck on Windows the tasks would be tedious.
Honestly, it’s a pain in the ass. The shortcuts are different from the browser, so you forget and hit Ctrl+V. Then you remember and hit Ctrl+Shift+V and get some scribbles around what you were typing
They were there long before the browser. The problem is that they should work in the browser but they don’t.
It’s insane to me that Windows still doesn’t have a proper package manager. When you need to upgrade a program you’re expected to go to their website and download the latest version, or update it with its own update mechanism.
i mean its just a matter that app makers avoid the windows store. the only companies i recall I remotely use on the windows store are nvidias control panel (which is ironically being depricated for nvidia app and updates itself).
companies just don’t want to use the windows store aome because of the fear at some point if microsoft wants to take a cut of profits, they could strong arm it like android/ios/game console OS. Linux has the advantage that people will trust that repositories wont be paid.
At the same time if there’s a software I don’t use often I’m not wasting my time updating it every time I update everything else. So for example I haven’t played a game on the Ubisoft launcher in about a year, next time I do it will update to the current version from last year’s version and that will be it.
They do, several third party options and of course the Microsoft store too. It’s the users who are stuck in their old ways, which ironically is the harder way. Weird.
Just wait when you try AUR on arch systems. I was long time ubuntu based user but once I tasted rolling release and AUR I don’t want to go back.
I was a Nobara user and I’ve gone back. Too many updates that Bork the DE/bootloader (TBF it’s not as maintained as AUR) As for fedora… Random NVidia update borked the system too… But I’m resigned as my GPU being cursed rather than the distro being the isue
It is going to make to want to go back
Someday
When you least expect it, and have a deadline
That happened to me few times, once GPU driver update, once grub update, both relatively easy to fix by searching the error on Endeavour forums and reading their official updates. And both of these issues was me not reading the update notes.
And when I was once forced to reinstall it was matter of an hour at most to have PC with working environment up and running, thanks to separate home mount and keeping all my installation notes in one place.
But one can do that with Ubuntu too.
I learnt one lesson from my manny distro-hopping sessions in the last 12 years, allways separate home from system amd keep all essential installation scripts and files in one place.
For me that day was yesterday. Ran an update. Next bootup got a black screen.
Saw it as a sign that it’s time to distro hop again lol
I know the feeling! I’ve been happily rolling with opensuse tumbleweed for almost a year now. Btrfs rollback is a life saver (2 times). Less than 5 minutes for a rollback. Other than that, pretty solid…
Snapper is the shit
I once installed HP shitbox printer drivers from the command line in 30 seconds, and the shitbox printer just…worked.
My heart soared higher than the eagle. I touched the face of the one true FOSS God, and felt that thing when astronauts have epiphanies about the Earth. 10/10, would recommend.
Mine worked out of the box on mint. Like, it detected the network HP shitbox and I could print, no user intervention. I was floored.
Same on most distros I’ve tried recently. Fedora, OpenSUSE, CachyOS, Bazzite. Not vanilla Arch obviously
The moment I loved the FOSS community was when I went on an Linux IRC channel, complained about my wifi not working, and some stranger messaged me detailed instructions with a patch in 20 minutes that completely fixed my issue.
At the same time it encourages people to just trust whatever people are telling them to input in the terminal, which is potentially dangerous.
Piping curl into sh is sadly a very common install method these days
But you are right
I once plugged my laptop into the scanner and it just worked
I spent days tinkering with proprietary, outdated (seriously, win XP as target) programs that provide sort-of drivers, and nothing worked.
I think that is just wildly amazing that printer drivers in Linux so often just work. I plugged in a wireless printer the other day and the hardest part was connecting it to the network. Once that was done BOOM Ubuntu found it and I could print. Those driver maintainers are doing a great job!
Funnily enough, you have the Apple folks to thank for that.
sane-airprint is a Mac invention, but Macs use the common Unit printer system, so Linux benefits from itCapitalism vs Communism on a small scale
One is “We’re not making profit anymore, so not paying anyone to do this. Also not publishing the source because of IP.”, the other one is “I have fun doing this, I think I’ll adapt the driver to my printer. Open ofc, so others can benefit, while all others, including me, benefit from others achievements.”
Yeah. Everyone I know that switched to Linux liked that as well.
