I just installed Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (Cinnamon) on an empty laptop a couple days ago and have been experimenting a lot. I’m coming from being a Windows user since I was just a little kid playing old DOS games on my grandpa’s Win-98 PC back in around 2000. My daily driver is currently running Windows 10 but I am pretty adamant on not going with Win-11. I’ve been wanting to experiment with Linux for a while and Cinnamon so far seems like a lot of fun to navigate. Terminal is amazing. The fact that you can custom-write keyboard commands that can be hand-tailored to individual programs on your computer via the OS… that’s powerful.
I have not tried running WINE yet but I plan on doing so soon. I also have not done much of anything, honestly, except for learning how to search for programs with gnome-software --search=. I have also used sudo a couple times to download software here and there, but I know I am not tackling this in as systematic of a way as I ought to be to really figure this machine out.
What are some really important basic commands I can use to start branching out into Terminal command structures and learning more about how I can edit and customize my computer? And if Cinnamon has shortfalls or weaknesses that I may run into eventually, what are some good alternative distros that I could leapfrog to eventually? I do not have any coding experience (currently), but I do consider myself a semi-power-user on Windows, having messed with CMD many times and digging through all the damn menus to access drivers and alter ports.
First thing I’d do is ditch the GUI file manager: get comfortable with cd, ls, mv, rm, etc.
After that, maybe start with basic text manipulation, like grep, awk, sort, uniq, etc. This ties in nicely with IO redirection, which is essential for a “CLI based workflow.” Get comfortable with pipes and file redirection, it’s extremely powerful!
Writing shell scripts is another super useful exercise: any time you find yourself running the same set of commands multiple times, think about making it a shell script. You may end up with some really useful little custom tools that way.
There‘s no reason not to use both. For some things a GUI file manager is more convenient.