Is it mandatory to use the terminal for everything?
No. Most distros have a GUI that you can use to install stuff without touching the terminal, and most distros have a GUI for configuring your system (think Control Panel in Windows).
It’s not necessary to use the terminal, but I do recommend eventually learning how to use the terminal, for a couple reasons:
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It’s more ubiquitous - like you said, a lot of places online give terminal instructions, not GUI instructions for things, so knowing your way around the terminal is helpful in those situations. Plus, it makes things a little more distro-agnostic - if I’m trying to install some program, I know I can probably run
apt installregardless of whether I’m running Mint, Ubuntu, PopOS, or any other Debian-based distro that uses the apt package manager. -
It’s usually faster. Opening a terminal window and typing in a few dozen characters is usually going to take less time than digging through a couple layers of menus.
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It’s more flexible. A lot of times, GUIs are just fronts for a terminal based application, and sometimes they only partially implement the features the terminal app exposes. By using the terminal app directly, you aren’t limited by whatever options happen to be made available in the GUI.
Again though, it’s not necessary to use the terminal. It’s definitely helpful, especially if you want to do gaming, or if you’re used to being a power user (which it seems like you are in Windows), but certainly not a requirement these days.
