Oh-My-Zsh (https://ohmyz.sh/) is good if you want to try a nice suite of plugins and dotfiles.

or zoxide and yazi

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”)

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

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.

you’ve seen top, get ready for btop

middle mouse click is like magic, but CTRL-SHIFT-C/V usually works

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.

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.

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.

Removed by mod

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.

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?

plus it makes you feel like a hacker for a few seconds

“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

Times like this make me miss reddit gold

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.