Just installed mint yesterday, I get it now

I had the exact same experience when I first tried Linux. But now when I am evily forced into using Windows and HATE it any other way. Also I despise the windows terminal now (PowerShell & CMD).

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 kind of like install wizards and black and white command console, but that's just me.

Also, updates.
"hey computer! Update!"
"Sure thing, here is a list of 57 packages I will update, y/n?"
"y"
"ok... done!"
👌
- But how do Linux users handle the crippling loneliness of their operating system not pestering them with ads on every update? How else can you know if your computer loves you? Where is the warmth of the corporate embrace?
  
  There's an app for that!
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftteamsblog/microsoft-teams-is-now-available-on-linux/1056267
  
  We shitpost on Lemmy and start flame wars about vi vs. emacs, X11 vs Wayland, sysvinit vs systemd, snaps vs flatpak, etc.
  
  Sometimes I run the update command and there hasn't been an update since yesterday. I think that's pretty close.
  
  "Welcome to Costco. I love you."
  
  I really wanted mr. Satya to watch my screen with Recall 😥
- plus it makes you feel like a hacker for a few seconds
  
  Underrated comment
- “Hey computer, I don’t like when you ask for that confirmation, just do it”
  “Oh, -y, I got you”
- Two clicks with the update thingy on Mint, if I could never have to use the terminal I might be tempted to uninstall Windows completely.
- New copypasta of 2025: ~~I use Arch btw~~ I use Mint btw
  
  It's actually I use NixOS fwiw
- It's not a big deal via terminal but for me and probably the average user, a decent update UI is superior. I want my computer to remind me like once a week and then update with one or two clicks. Updating via terminal does not appeal to me.
  
  And this happens too. I get a little tray icon saying 'do updates' and I tap that and all my applications whether fwupd (firmware), flatpak or rpm updates are there and I click 'go', including the most recent nvidia drivers. In my case, KDE 'discover' does this for me. I'm so lazy as to not want to bother running the three terminal commands (dnf, fwupdmgr, and flatpak).
  Meanwhile, under windows, I do that, but then it doesn't do my firmware, so my hardware vendor has their own updater (which also suggests driver updates that Microsoft does not suggest), but if I use those then I still miss out on decent nvidia drivers, I need to go to nvidia to get those updates. And pretty much every application is then independently telling me time to update something or another in a never ending parade of 'update me now' icons in the tray.
  Meanwhile it can be greatly mitigated in Windows by opening up a terminal and doing a winget update. Except it keeps offering up this one Office update that hangs with a blank terminal in my screen, and it still misses half the stuff..
  
  Sure, it's a matter taste and I too like a good UI.
  Both can exist, that's a another beauty of linux.
  
  Linux Mint has a good update GUI that can be accessed via a system tray icon in the taskbar.
- Getting me silenced by the mob of mods is just what a dirty Linux user would do.
  Removed Comment: Windows has winget upgrade --all. Fucking cultists.
  
  Though it doesn't work fully, and as it works it's spewing windows on my screen, because so much of the windows ecosystem doesn't believe in headless operation.
- Guess what I did last night? I spent 4 hours working on getting PSD, XCF and KRA thumbnailers working in Mint. It took custom scripts to be written and each one required different commands because KRA files are just a zip file so you have to extract that and grab one of 3 possible preview files that might exist inside that zip and make that the thumbnail, while in gimp files you cant just use convert command, even convert[0] will only turn the first layer into a thumbnail and thats completely useless. And to top off all that, I finally got thumbnails working in gnome/nautilus but Only the XCF thumbs will generate in cinnamon/nemo (I still have no clue why that is) but I cannot just switch to gnome because there is technically no gnome variant of Mint so gnome doesnt work 100%... etc etc etc
  Linux is still not there, this stuff should be simple and automatic. If a 20 year professional took 4 hours to get this far, the average user will give up immediately. Yes Mint is still my daily driver, but seriously thumbnails should not be this much work.
  
  publish your scripts and you might save the next guy some hours 🙂
- Does it also update Firefox and Discord and the OS and my graphics card drivers and everything else?

The Windows terminal has some very good commands. 'ssh username@server' can log you right into a Linux machine!
- Times like this make me miss reddit gold
  
  Just make a $2 donation to their host. Much better than reddit gold.
  
  Nope.
  
  Lemmy Lemon 🍋?
  
  Just donate $5 to your instance or the lemmy devs.
- I setup open SSH on windows so you can swing it both ways!
  My main gripe is it runs cmd.exe and I gotta powershell to jump into that. If you auto powershell it doesn't work right.

tab completion works in more places than you might expect
ctrl-a/ctrl-e for start/end of line
ctrl-u to clear the command you’ve typed so far but store it into a temporary pastebuffer
ctrl-y to paste the ctrl-u’d command
ctrl-w to delete by word (I prefer binding to alt-backspace though)
ctrl-r to search your command history
alt-b/alt-f to move cursor back/forwards by word
!! is shorthand for the previous run command; handy for sudo !!
!$ is the last argument of the previous command; useful more often than you’d think
which foo tells you where the foo program is located
ls -la
cd without any args takes you to your home dir
cd - takes you to your previous dir
~ is a shorthand for your home dir
- I've been using the commandline for so long but was always too lazy to look up the rest of these commands after ctrl+a/e and ctrl+r THANK YOU!!!
  post this commend again and again! There's always lazy idiots like me who will be helped that way!
- alt-. also pastes the last argument of the previous command (useful if you need to modify it a bit)
  instead of any shortcuts starting with "alt" you can also press "esc" followed by the second key, e.g. pressing "esc", releasing it and then "a" is the same as pressing "alt-a" (useful if you have only one hand available, or if alt is not availalble)
  if you put a space before a command, it will not be saved in history (useful sometimes, e.g. if you pass a password directly as an argument)
- Makes me realize just how illogical and bad these shortcuts are
  
  I believe, these are Emacs shortcuts. There's also set -o vi in bash, but I've never used it, so can't vouch for it.
- Saved! Thank you so much.
  I've used Linux full-time since late 2020 and I never knew about ctrl+y and ctrl+u.
  I'd also like to contribute some knowledge.
  aliases
  You can put these into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or whatever shell you use.
  bash
  
  ### ### ls aliases ### # ls = colors alias ls='ls --color=auto' # ll = ls + human readable file sizes alias ll='ls -lh --color=auto' # lla = ll + show hidden files and folders alias lla='ls -lah --color=auto' ### ### other aliases ### # set color for different commands alias diff='diff --color=auto' alias grep='grep --color=auto' alias ip='ip --color=auto' # my favourite way of navigating to a far-off folder # this scans my home folder and presents me with a list of # fuzzy-searchable folders # you need fzf and fd installed for this alias to work alias cdd='cd "$(sudo fd -t d . ${HOME} | fzf)"'
  recommendations
  ncdu - a shell-based tool to analyze disk usage, think GNOME's baobab or KDE's filelight but in the terminal
  zellij - tmux but easy and with nice colors
  atuin - shell history but good, fuzzy-searchable. If you still have the basic shell history (when pressing ctrl+r), I cannot recommend this enough.
  ranger - a terminal file-browser (does everything I need and way more)
  
  Also, Terminal User Interfaces are a nice middle ground between learning terminal commands and having a GUI.
  Example:
  btop - process manager TUI
  ncmpcpp - TUI media player, used mpd on the backend
  Here's a big list: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
  
  +1 for Atuin. I constantly use it on my machine and SSH-ing on remote machines who don't have it is an absolute pain.
  I'm gonna have to save this thread and check some of those!
- If you’re looking for a full list of these kind of navigation shortcuts, they all come from readline so read the man page for that. Or just look up the basic navigation of emacs which is what readline is mimicking.
  
  A neat thing is that a lot of command line programs use readline. So learning and configuring it will also be useful in for example the Python REPL and calc.
  Here are some neat configuration options you can put in ~/.inputrc
  bash
  
  set completion-ignore-case on set show-all-if-ambiguous on set completion-prefix-display-length 9 set blink-matching-paren on set mark-symlinked-directories on
  And if you are a sensible person who is used to vim
  bash
  
  set editing-mode vi set show-mode-in-prompt on
- Saving this! Absolutely gold, thanks for writing it up. You're what makes the Linux community cool. ❤️
  tab completion works in more places than you might expect
  I've found tab to be such a nice "please give me a hint" button.
  Bonus tip : Sometimes you won't get auto complete because there's too many possibilities and the computer can't be certain which one you want. Hitting tab multiple times will show the possibilities, so you can type in enough characters to remove ambiguity, hit tab again, and boom auto complete!
  ...That was a terribly convoluted explanation I'm sorry. Just try hitting tab multiple times for fun if you're stuck it's kinda handy. Lol
- Nice list, TIL about Ctrl+U and Ctrl+Y.
  If I may add, Ctrl+X into Ctrl+E opens $EDITOR to edit the current line.
- What's the shortcut for scrolling the terminal?
- For me the Home/End keys also go to the start/end of a line like ctrl-a/ctrl-e, and ctrl-tab/ctrl-Tab move the cursor fwd/back a word at a time.

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.
- 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.
- I once plugged my linux 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, on windows.
  
  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!
- 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

When the GUI fails, Terminal will have your back; can I get an Amen?
- When my computer starts to run out of ram and I immediately try and switch into the CLI so I can launch htop and kill the offender
  
  find the traitor and kill him!
- Amen. Hallelujah! AMEN! Ooh yeah brothers and sisters, AaaAAaAmen!
  PS: this is not a cult BTW
  
  It is, but it’s a very nice cult.
- amen

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.
- It is going to make to want to go back
  Someday
  When you least expect it, and have a deadline
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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

Welcome in from the cold. We have hot cocoa and blankets.

Just wait until you find the fun TUI utilities, ill share a few:
Shell: Fish (has powerful auto-complete, very fast, written in rust)
Montior: Btop (monitors all system resources and processes)
Fetch: Fastfetch (perfect for showing off on !unixporn@lemmy.world, for !unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone Hyfetch is reccomnded)
Brower: BrowSH (its a browser in your terminal)
Text Editor: Vim (the best text editor, remeber to use esc + : + q to close or wq to write close vim. However when you open vim you can never quit)
File manager: Ranger (if cd + ls is too inconvenient)
Games (yes you can even play games in the terminal): 2048, Chess-TUI, NSnake, and Micro Tetris
More cool TUI tools
- next step to full on conversion is making your own dotfiles repo :)
  
  Then get an old librebooted Thinkpad X230 with Arch GNU/Linux (and remind eveyone it's GNU + Linux) :3
- I have to check out some of these!
  As for the browser, how does it display sites? Does it display images/video/play audio or is it mostly for just the text based stuff? How about ads/adblockers?
  
  My guess is it works like Lynx.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
  You mainly get basic text formatting with some colors. It's kinda neat. I imagine text heavy sites like Wikipedia (or Lemmy instances! Maybe other Fediverse stuff?) would be decent with it.
  You can open media with external applications it says though.
  Also hey, it's not running all that fancy privacy-killing JavaScript! :D
  In some situations I imagine it's fantastic for making your browsing look like you're working on something important, if you have a problem with nosy shoulder-surfers.

I really like having a hotkey bound to the terminal window, so I can pop open a terminal, check something, and return to what I was doing.
https://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/tilda
- FWIW, most Debians (which includes Ubuntu and Mint) have Ctrl+Alt+T set to open the default terminal program without needing to install anything else. This is usually reconfigurable in the system settings too if that's an awkward stretch.
  But I get that people like the drop-down terminals too, for which see also Yakuake and Guake.
  
  Before Tilde and friends, that's what I use. I prefer having a drop-down with the same terminal session.
  But that's a handy default.
- For a moment I wondered why I never bound a hotkey thusly, but it's because I simply almost always have at least one terminal open in each workspace.
  
  I don't really use a mouse or window switcher, so I prefer the dedicated hotkey. It's nice to have a single keystroke that brings me in or out of the same terminal across every desktop.
- Why the hell did they misspell (and presumably mispronounce) tilde?

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
  
  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.
- i'd also recommend scoop. when i had windows before i switched, i preferred it to winget or chocolately.

Yeah. Everyone I know that switched to Linux liked that as well.

Isn't it fun? It's like owning your car and learning what everything actually does, and figuring out how to fix it. And having an amazing community to boot!. I enjoy it.
- I'm thinking of making Linux my daily driver apart for some software I need for work. People are super positive about it on here, but isn't it still the case that some peripherals won't work? Or that I'll spend a ton of time making the system work instead of actually using the system?
  It would be for gaming that I'd use the Linux installation mostly.
  
  Speaking from personal experience but pretty universal one at that.
  Once terminal kinda "clicks" you will get the urge to tweak stuff. It happens because there is bunch "demo apps" that are just cool to mess around with but simply don't get known on co-orperate OS. Check this as example.
  If games you play or tools you use can be fitted to linux, at some point you will port 80% of your workflow just messing around during the tweaking. Like when you do your first rice.
  And after that you can confidently chose if you want to add on to that or continue dualboot.
  
  It depends a lot on your hardware. All of my stuff was picked up instantly (all AMD), my kb/mouse/tartarus of course, and my Logitech wheel. Now if you mean VR, linux struggles with that right now at least for oculus. The vive is ok with steam only games I heard.
  I treat it a lot like an old car. I love it and tinkering on it is fun, but if an emergency pops up and I have to, I can reboot into windows. Really trying to never have to do that, except for VR and games like PUBG (which yeah we shouldn't support but my friends and I still like it sometimes).
  If you're the type that craves learning and the journey is more fun than the goal (ie, me), then do it! I just put mint and popos on 3 different computers and have been having a lot of fun with it.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

You've taken your first step into a larger world.

I installed mint yesterday and am having a PAIN installing anything not in the software manager. Currently stuck on teamspeak as my first thing to try. Got a tar.gz and can't find anything well explained online (as of yet, it was already 3 hours just to get mint to dual boot and I was exhausted)
- With .tar.gz software usually the steps are:
  Extract the archive
  Find a file with the .sh extention - that's the shell script. It will most likely be named something like install.sh
  Make it executable - by right clicking and enabling it in the properties or by opening a terminal in this folder and using a command:
  
  chmod +x install.sh
  Run the installer in the terminal:
  
  ./install.sh
  It might ask you to run it as root and quit. In that case put a sudo before the command above and it will ask you for your password
  
  sudo ./install.sh
  And tbat's it, installation should begin. Follow the instructions in your terminal.
- Can't say for TeamSpeak, but will say for Linux: setting everything up and figuring out your steps in edge cases is the hardest part. Once you figure it out, it gets so much easier.
- Imma just update: I have given up and wiped the drive to use it as a game drive for windows again. Each turn just gave hours of headache and I'm just done trying.
  Installing Mint took over 3 hours of searching obscure errors with solutions that were way too technical. In the end having gone from 5pm to 11pm just to get Mint dual booting. Got it installed and got teamspeak and stuff installed, after a bit too long having to find out but that's fine. Spent 4 hours trying to get steam games to run, not a single working boot and couldn't find anything online.
  I might try again once I get my new AMD based game pc whenever I have budget for it. But for now, nah this took too long and took way too much effort. I just started a new work project which has already been exhausting and I just plain don't have the energy to bother with this. Its not plug and play like people like to say online.
- https://flathub.org/ is a great way to manage linux apps/programmes. Very easy and several other benefits

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

Niw you are doomed and there is no going back. Welcome to the gang;)

i like leaving top on all day just to watch it.
- you've seen top, get ready for btop
  
  i'm definitely ready to btop
  
  I'm the htopopotamus, my processes are bottomless

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.
- I literally only use it when a how-to guide explains exactly what to do and why. Then I forget what I did and look up how to do it again six months later. I'm fine with this arrangement, though I will prefer to have to use it less.

Could you 'splain it to me? Cuz I installed Mint 3 months ago, totally happy, and I don't get it.

Madthumbs in shambles

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.

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

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.
- 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.
- Many terminals let you do that, just change keybinds. The issue is Ctrl+C is used to stop/kill a running command.
- 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.

I'm getting ready to change one of my Ubuntu machines over to Mint, as the next iteration of Ubuntu requires more RAM. While I've done these changes many times, I've never quite understood the deal with setting up the partitions.

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.