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.
My tip would be to try a few distros before you settle on one. Ubuntu was it for me about seven years ago, but I used mint for a few years and am using MX with xfce now.
Also,
sudo !!
is pretty useful when you forget tosudo
the previous command. It means “super user do the last command I just boneheadedly forgot to do that to”can use
!! < >
in any place to bring last command. Not used much as you could just do an up arrow but helps if you edit around a lot and experimenting with a cli tool or command.Also,
!!
is a shortcut for!-1
so if you want the 2nd latest command you could do!-2
and so on.