• 15 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I didn’t say you have to know everything, just like I don’t know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don’t pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.

    That’s what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.

    But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that’s not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.

    That’s what “knowing the terminal” gives you. It’s a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere “user” of a system to an owner of a system. I don’t think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.

    Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there’s a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and “user friendly” in all ways that harm a user’s rights and freedoms.



  • If you want to use Linux without the terminal nowadays it’s pretty easy. But also I think the fear of the terminal is part of the culture that consumer electronics have cultivated where people don’t know (or want to know) how their systems work.

    If you take the time to use it, not only can you save yourself time, but also learn a lot more about how you can fix things when they go wrong! That kind of knowledge gives you so much more ownership of your system, because you don’t have to rely on your manufacturer to solve problems for you.

    Same for Mac and Windows too, the terminal is something that shouldn’t be necessary, but when it is it helps to know what you’re doing. :)