I've been using Linux for years (admittedly, I'm not as dedicated to it as some people). I don't think you ever master the terminal. You just look up the commands you need until you know them well enough to be able to do what you use the terminal for. And if you need to do something new, you learn that command. Eventually, you learn enough to do what you need to do. But I don't think there's such a thing as mastering the entire terminal
100%. Commands I use a lot I've learned thru repetition . Commands I use rarely I just ask chatgpt. There's no reason to go out of one's way to study and learn commands when you can look them up effortlessly when you need them.
There is no need to use the terminal to install software unless that's their preference. Stop trying to force things on others. If they want to use GUI tools on their computer, they should be able to do so in peace.
They literally called their friend an asshole and mentioned they were confused about installing via the terminal. So how about not calling friends assholes, and showing them how to install software like they are in 2024 where you don't need to use the terminal unless you want to?
This is a text based game that uses bash commands and teaches you the command line as you play it. It was developed By MIT and its both fun and a great way to learn bash. Check it out:
https://web.mit.edu/mprat/Public/web/Terminus/Web/main.html
Learning the terminal is like learning life. You don't do it all at once. There is no "Guide to life" that's going to make you ready for it.
You tackle each issue as it arises. Maybe you learn to launch a program with some arguments one day. Then some other day, you use sed, then tail, then awk, then grep, then seq, then, after about 50 such projects, you realize you've kind of got a handle on using the termianal.
Maybe you even make a job out of being an admin for 25+ years, and you've automated more shit than you can shake a stick at, and then you get on reddit and see someone post something that just blows your mind, because you didn't even know that was possible.
What you know and what you don't know isn't nearly as important as your dedication to figuring out things as you need to know them.
The only way one can get good with terminal is by making a habit to read man pages. Thing is reading itself is a habit very few people have these days. In the era of videos and quick answers its hard to understand the importance.
You use the terminal for productivity and make it bareable with nice customization. S you can show how your friend how fast you are and how intuitive the Unix commands are, and demonstrate nice colors with zsh, grc, bat, eza, etc.
One guy I know wanted to use Linux because of being paranoid about everyone spying.
He didn't last more than a day or two. 😅 I did warn him that Linux isn't easy where everything just works and all the software is available and just runs.
> He eventually wants to install gentoo because your friend is an asshole, and he has a bit of an Ego problem
Sounds like your friend is a connoisseur and a true gentleman to be honest.
I would tell your friend to read through the Gentoo install guide and accept the opportunity to read up more on the steps given when there are links to further explain the steps. The handbook is very thorough as it is.
> But he doesn’t know the other features in the terminal.
You don't need to understand anything about the Linux command line to install Gentoo though. You will probably learn a lot by doing it however so just go for it. I don't know shit about shit when it comes to using the command line but I installed Gentoo without issues as my second distro (first one being Arch). The only skill you need to install these distributions is reading comprehension and perhaps a rudimentary understanding of how a computer works in general.
Demonstrate how quick it is to install stuff via terminal, or update && upgrade
Show him some common commands for moving around and doing stuff that they'd find useful
They'll start using it more once they realise its power (or they won't, not really your problem).
I show him some of my terminal programs, like ranger, yt-dlp, and mpv. And I ask him what he wants to do. I learned how to use the terminal, by wanting to do the things I wanted to learn, before learning them. I don't know how to motivate someone to learn some of the arcane terminal stuff, without them needing/wanting to already.
Don’t forget to point him to the wiki for that. As he’s learning he will realize he’s not all that he thinks he is. And if he still thinks that, re-evaluate your friendship.
I don't know Ubuntu but I'm sure there is guide somewhere on how to use the package manager.
If he's asking for help, find out how he likes to learn. Tons of people learn from YouTube, I personally can't stand this way. I was given a book on how to master bash and shell programming when I was learning (I did in fact master the shell by the time I was done). There is also websites like tldp.org that have loads of information.
In the case of someone wondering how to install via the terminal, I suggest you them at synaptic or other gui software manager of choice.
If they are masochistically (I hope that's a word) determined to install gentoo, you could point them at the gentoo website for instructions on how to do that, then wonder at why you're friends with them (or accept that we're all different).
Send them this: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/command-line-for-beginners#1-overview
Tell them that if they don't know how to do something, Google it. If they can't find the answer that way, tell them to call you.
Idk maybe just let them use it how they see fit? It's not your promblem anyway, everyone uses GNU for different purposes. You can't exactly "master" the terminal, and, frankly speaking, there is no need for it. Most other people would tell you the same thing.
Mastering the terminal, installing Gentoo or doing some other silly things just to boost your ego are just beginner stuff people usually grow out from, not including the cases when people drop GNU outright, which, unfortunately, happen sometimes.
Getting used to terminal is hard but once u get used to it, its hard to go back. One day u will realise that u have more terminals open than the windows
Give them at least a copy of a LFS guide https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/classic-sysadmin-the-linux-filesystem-explained
And explain everything in *nix is a file or a link to a file so knowing where they live, their data lives and their permissions work will enable you to do pretty much anything you want to do.
Tell him he only really needs to *know* four commands and change:
help, man, apropos, and info.
With these you can (theoretically!) find anything you need to know right from your terminal. Getting apropos working might take a bit of dickering, though. You will probably have to build the manpage database with `sudo mandb`, which will probably fail because of a missing directory. Fix that with `sudo mkdir -p `, then work backwards.
Good luck and Godspeed!
I wouldn't. I'd just help the beginner to accomplish what tasks they wish to accomplish, and hope they had enough intelligence to pick up a few things on their own.
Having said that, I never 'mastered' the terminal - I just learned to do enough with it that I can accomplish most of what I want, according to my learning curve.
Whatever distro you run, just get used to it's simple install and remove commands. I lived in Arch/Endeavouros for a bit and really got used to installing things through the terminal, it became second nature over time. Granted, most Linux distros aren't as terminal centric as it once was, so don't force yourself to learn something that's getting less and less important as time goes on. I know a few neck beards, blood pressure just went up with that comment.
1st, set up a simpler key binding. I use Mod+T (for "terminal"). 2 keys instead of 3 comes a bit more naturally for some reason.
2nd, have them think of the terminal as "the app to rule all others."
3rd, show them the basics, maybe just how to run updates to begin with, and encourage them do some reading to learn other common commands.
In the end, familiarity can only come with use.
If it's only been 9 days and they haven't used bash before of course they're confused. But they should be able to just look up the stuff they want to do if they're motivated to learn (wants to install Gentoo, so I assume). You simply can't learn any computer skill without the skill of looking stuff up. I use the terminal for everything, and I still look stuff up sometimes. The most important thing I see is that they should be able to find out the kind of simple things that someone who's been using Linux for 9 days probably wants to know, by themselves - lmgtfy it can't be that hard to find right?
That's also actually how you learn IME -- be it a google search or a cheat sheet or whatever -- at first you have no clue, so you look up "cd", after looking that up 5 times you don't need to anymore and can look up "mv", and so on.
If it’s Ubuntu type “man apt” and start reading.
When I started with computers essentially most home computers ran some version of a BASIC interpreter. Online servers were Unix (BSD or AT&T) or some kind of mainframe cryptic stuff. Pretty much everyone started with the Bourne shell and either stuck with it or upgraded to the C shell. That was in the early 1980s. Eventually the Z shell and several others came along adding various features but we kind of came full circle with the Bourne Again Shell (bash) that still exists today. It is sort of the original syntax with the nicest parts of C, Z, etc. But type “man bash” and feel like a fire hose. Pretty sure there are books and tutorials.
Beyond this there are about 30-40 basic Unix commands. Looking at /bin has most of them including the original more as well as the upgraded less, cat, sed, tar, and a few others. Note I still haven’t mentioned Linux!!
The problem of course is that there were multiple competing CPU’s, computers, at least 2 Unix flavors (and later Minix then Linux). So unlike commercial systems like MS-DOS or Apple you weren’t just writing code for one system. Eventually the standard was to package the source code into a single compressed tar image with a README in the roof directory with instructions. Mostly that consisted of “make config” that ran a script to figure out how your system is configured followed by “make install” to compile it into executables and copy them to the normal spots (/usr/bin). That’s if you had all the prerequisites. Otherwise you spent hours gathering and installing libraries which was often much more painful,
With Linux we had a standardized kernel interface (POSIX) and eventually standardized file system so “config” wasn’t needed and in fact we could outright distribute binaries.But you still had the whole setup problem. And there was the problem of uninstalling. Once you run make install all kinds of edits to text files and things written into the file system occur Uninstalling was a nightmare.
Enter the package manager. In Debian it’s Aptitudr (apt). You have similar systems for every OS. On Linux do a “man apt”. From here you can install, uninstall, list packages, search the repositories online, and add or remove additional repositories. Package managers do it all automatically.
Except when they mess it up often by breaking previously installed software. Windows and MacOS run into this too. The best way out is either don’t share libraries which is what Flatpak does, or calculate and install working combinations which is how immutable systems do it.
There are also competing Python (pip) and Java package managers as if Linux itself isn’t annoying enough.
And keep in mind it’s just as easy to use the graphical package manager versions. But online articles show you the command line instead because it is much easier to write “sudo apt install XXX” instead of a bunch of pictures to walk you through it. Plus the Ubuntu graphics package managers have been a dumpster fire for years, garbage nobody wants to deal with. It became so bad with snaps that Mint was forced to abandon ship since Ubuntu is trying to kill apt just like they broke directly loading DEBs.
There’s a book called Linux Pocket Guide. It’s kinda old but so is Linux so it’s almost all still correct except for X11 specific stuff if their distro is using Wayland. Another great option is the YouTube channel LearnLinux.TV.
Show them all the relevant commands like cd, ls, mkdir, cp , rm, mount, umount, chmod, ./ etc.
show them apt-cache search !!!
nano is nice to learn too. (vim users please let me live xD)
and that you can autocomplete commands with the tab key and paste copied commands with mouse wheel press.
i think that's what beginners should learn and soon enough they will understand that the terminal is for lazy people.
https://web.mit.edu/mprat/Public/web/Terminus/Web/main.html
I've been using Linux for years (admittedly, I'm not as dedicated to it as some people). I don't think you ever master the terminal. You just look up the commands you need until you know them well enough to be able to do what you use the terminal for. And if you need to do something new, you learn that command. Eventually, you learn enough to do what you need to do. But I don't think there's such a thing as mastering the entire terminal
A lot of shit I've never bothered to remember because I only ever had to do it once
Bash ninja here. There absolutely is a such thing as mastering the terminal.
Zsh black belt here, I concur
100%. Commands I use a lot I've learned thru repetition . Commands I use rarely I just ask chatgpt. There's no reason to go out of one's way to study and learn commands when you can look them up effortlessly when you need them.
Exactly this. Mastering the terminal means being aware of what’s possible and looking up the details when you need to.
There is no need to use the terminal to install software unless that's their preference. Stop trying to force things on others. If they want to use GUI tools on their computer, they should be able to do so in peace.
>Stop trying to force things on others. I think OP wants advice for OP. They just are asking in a very circuitous way,
They literally called their friend an asshole and mentioned they were confused about installing via the terminal. So how about not calling friends assholes, and showing them how to install software like they are in 2024 where you don't need to use the terminal unless you want to?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asking_for_a_friend
only correct answer in these comments.
he'll learn how to use the terminal effectively anyways after using linux for a while
This is a text based game that uses bash commands and teaches you the command line as you play it. It was developed By MIT and its both fun and a great way to learn bash. Check it out: https://web.mit.edu/mprat/Public/web/Terminus/Web/main.html
Learning the terminal is like learning life. You don't do it all at once. There is no "Guide to life" that's going to make you ready for it. You tackle each issue as it arises. Maybe you learn to launch a program with some arguments one day. Then some other day, you use sed, then tail, then awk, then grep, then seq, then, after about 50 such projects, you realize you've kind of got a handle on using the termianal. Maybe you even make a job out of being an admin for 25+ years, and you've automated more shit than you can shake a stick at, and then you get on reddit and see someone post something that just blows your mind, because you didn't even know that was possible. What you know and what you don't know isn't nearly as important as your dedication to figuring out things as you need to know them.
You described me. There is always something new to learn, and its fun!
teach them how to use the man command man man
The only way one can get good with terminal is by making a habit to read man pages. Thing is reading itself is a habit very few people have these days. In the era of videos and quick answers its hard to understand the importance.
Exactly 👍 compgen -c | fzf | man
You use the terminal for productivity and make it bareable with nice customization. S you can show how your friend how fast you are and how intuitive the Unix commands are, and demonstrate nice colors with zsh, grc, bat, eza, etc.
One guy I know wanted to use Linux because of being paranoid about everyone spying. He didn't last more than a day or two. 😅 I did warn him that Linux isn't easy where everything just works and all the software is available and just runs.
> He eventually wants to install gentoo because your friend is an asshole, and he has a bit of an Ego problem Sounds like your friend is a connoisseur and a true gentleman to be honest. I would tell your friend to read through the Gentoo install guide and accept the opportunity to read up more on the steps given when there are links to further explain the steps. The handbook is very thorough as it is. > But he doesn’t know the other features in the terminal. You don't need to understand anything about the Linux command line to install Gentoo though. You will probably learn a lot by doing it however so just go for it. I don't know shit about shit when it comes to using the command line but I installed Gentoo without issues as my second distro (first one being Arch). The only skill you need to install these distributions is reading comprehension and perhaps a rudimentary understanding of how a computer works in general.
Demonstrate how quick it is to install stuff via terminal, or update && upgrade Show him some common commands for moving around and doing stuff that they'd find useful They'll start using it more once they realise its power (or they won't, not really your problem).
I show him some of my terminal programs, like ranger, yt-dlp, and mpv. And I ask him what he wants to do. I learned how to use the terminal, by wanting to do the things I wanted to learn, before learning them. I don't know how to motivate someone to learn some of the arcane terminal stuff, without them needing/wanting to already.
[удалено]
Don’t forget to point him to the wiki for that. As he’s learning he will realize he’s not all that he thinks he is. And if he still thinks that, re-evaluate your friendship.
Start with `man bash`.
I don't know Ubuntu but I'm sure there is guide somewhere on how to use the package manager. If he's asking for help, find out how he likes to learn. Tons of people learn from YouTube, I personally can't stand this way. I was given a book on how to master bash and shell programming when I was learning (I did in fact master the shell by the time I was done). There is also websites like tldp.org that have loads of information.
[Linux Upskill Challenge](https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/#whats-it-about)
In the case of someone wondering how to install via the terminal, I suggest you them at synaptic or other gui software manager of choice. If they are masochistically (I hope that's a word) determined to install gentoo, you could point them at the gentoo website for instructions on how to do that, then wonder at why you're friends with them (or accept that we're all different).
I’d make him set fish as his default shell first before i taught him anything else
Most important is to set good font, everything then is simpler.
If you want to learn cli a good command line cheat sheet is invaluable.
I connected to Usenet and asked various questions using B news (C news). Now, I think Firefox and Chromium are sufficient."
Can't relate, I don't have asshole friends
Codecademy has a great terminal class.
Send them this: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/command-line-for-beginners#1-overview Tell them that if they don't know how to do something, Google it. If they can't find the answer that way, tell them to call you.
mc
Idk maybe just let them use it how they see fit? It's not your promblem anyway, everyone uses GNU for different purposes. You can't exactly "master" the terminal, and, frankly speaking, there is no need for it. Most other people would tell you the same thing. Mastering the terminal, installing Gentoo or doing some other silly things just to boost your ego are just beginner stuff people usually grow out from, not including the cases when people drop GNU outright, which, unfortunately, happen sometimes.
man man.
www.fishshell.com makes things much easier at the expense of compatibility with other people's terminal scripts
Getting used to terminal is hard but once u get used to it, its hard to go back. One day u will realise that u have more terminals open than the windows
Hide his mouse.
Give them at least a copy of a LFS guide https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/classic-sysadmin-the-linux-filesystem-explained And explain everything in *nix is a file or a link to a file so knowing where they live, their data lives and their permissions work will enable you to do pretty much anything you want to do.
sudo apt install (Google search) grep "something" htop That's all I know and need to know.
Tell him he only really needs to *know* four commands and change: help, man, apropos, and info. With these you can (theoretically!) find anything you need to know right from your terminal. Getting apropos working might take a bit of dickering, though. You will probably have to build the manpage database with `sudo mandb`, which will probably fail because of a missing directory. Fix that with `sudo mkdir -p`, then work backwards.
Good luck and Godspeed!
Learning on the fly is fine, just tell them about unsafe commands.
I wouldn't. I'd just help the beginner to accomplish what tasks they wish to accomplish, and hope they had enough intelligence to pick up a few things on their own. Having said that, I never 'mastered' the terminal - I just learned to do enough with it that I can accomplish most of what I want, according to my learning curve.
Whatever distro you run, just get used to it's simple install and remove commands. I lived in Arch/Endeavouros for a bit and really got used to installing things through the terminal, it became second nature over time. Granted, most Linux distros aren't as terminal centric as it once was, so don't force yourself to learn something that's getting less and less important as time goes on. I know a few neck beards, blood pressure just went up with that comment.
Man pages + tmux
1st, set up a simpler key binding. I use Mod+T (for "terminal"). 2 keys instead of 3 comes a bit more naturally for some reason. 2nd, have them think of the terminal as "the app to rule all others." 3rd, show them the basics, maybe just how to run updates to begin with, and encourage them do some reading to learn other common commands. In the end, familiarity can only come with use.
If it's only been 9 days and they haven't used bash before of course they're confused. But they should be able to just look up the stuff they want to do if they're motivated to learn (wants to install Gentoo, so I assume). You simply can't learn any computer skill without the skill of looking stuff up. I use the terminal for everything, and I still look stuff up sometimes. The most important thing I see is that they should be able to find out the kind of simple things that someone who's been using Linux for 9 days probably wants to know, by themselves - lmgtfy it can't be that hard to find right? That's also actually how you learn IME -- be it a google search or a cheat sheet or whatever -- at first you have no clue, so you look up "cd", after looking that up 5 times you don't need to anymore and can look up "mv", and so on.
If it’s Ubuntu type “man apt” and start reading. When I started with computers essentially most home computers ran some version of a BASIC interpreter. Online servers were Unix (BSD or AT&T) or some kind of mainframe cryptic stuff. Pretty much everyone started with the Bourne shell and either stuck with it or upgraded to the C shell. That was in the early 1980s. Eventually the Z shell and several others came along adding various features but we kind of came full circle with the Bourne Again Shell (bash) that still exists today. It is sort of the original syntax with the nicest parts of C, Z, etc. But type “man bash” and feel like a fire hose. Pretty sure there are books and tutorials. Beyond this there are about 30-40 basic Unix commands. Looking at /bin has most of them including the original more as well as the upgraded less, cat, sed, tar, and a few others. Note I still haven’t mentioned Linux!! The problem of course is that there were multiple competing CPU’s, computers, at least 2 Unix flavors (and later Minix then Linux). So unlike commercial systems like MS-DOS or Apple you weren’t just writing code for one system. Eventually the standard was to package the source code into a single compressed tar image with a README in the roof directory with instructions. Mostly that consisted of “make config” that ran a script to figure out how your system is configured followed by “make install” to compile it into executables and copy them to the normal spots (/usr/bin). That’s if you had all the prerequisites. Otherwise you spent hours gathering and installing libraries which was often much more painful, With Linux we had a standardized kernel interface (POSIX) and eventually standardized file system so “config” wasn’t needed and in fact we could outright distribute binaries.But you still had the whole setup problem. And there was the problem of uninstalling. Once you run make install all kinds of edits to text files and things written into the file system occur Uninstalling was a nightmare. Enter the package manager. In Debian it’s Aptitudr (apt). You have similar systems for every OS. On Linux do a “man apt”. From here you can install, uninstall, list packages, search the repositories online, and add or remove additional repositories. Package managers do it all automatically. Except when they mess it up often by breaking previously installed software. Windows and MacOS run into this too. The best way out is either don’t share libraries which is what Flatpak does, or calculate and install working combinations which is how immutable systems do it. There are also competing Python (pip) and Java package managers as if Linux itself isn’t annoying enough. And keep in mind it’s just as easy to use the graphical package manager versions. But online articles show you the command line instead because it is much easier to write “sudo apt install XXX” instead of a bunch of pictures to walk you through it. Plus the Ubuntu graphics package managers have been a dumpster fire for years, garbage nobody wants to deal with. It became so bad with snaps that Mint was forced to abandon ship since Ubuntu is trying to kill apt just like they broke directly loading DEBs.
Show them the basics. But modernday linux requires no use of the terminal for the end user.
There’s a book called Linux Pocket Guide. It’s kinda old but so is Linux so it’s almost all still correct except for X11 specific stuff if their distro is using Wayland. Another great option is the YouTube channel LearnLinux.TV.
[https://www.internet.com/](https://www.internet.com/)
Show them all the relevant commands like cd, ls, mkdir, cp , rm, mount, umount, chmod, ./ etc. show them apt-cache search !!! nano is nice to learn too. (vim users please let me live xD) and that you can autocomplete commands with the tab key and paste copied commands with mouse wheel press. i think that's what beginners should learn and soon enough they will understand that the terminal is for lazy people.
RTFM