I’d love it if their equipment racks all simultaneously burst into flame the day it pops so they can’t pivot or hock their hoarded hardware to recoup the investment. Then again, if that finger on the monkey’s paw did curl, they’d probably all get bailed out by the taxpayers the following week anyway.
Win+R, wt, enter
Alt+Space, wt, enter (or .term and auto complete will fill in “Terminal”)
It’s pretty much identical in terms of keystrokes. I just always forget “wt” is the way to launch Windows Terminal from Run, and that it works with PowerToys Run as well. My main sell was that the latter is a decent quick launcher with some useful tools built in to keep you from ever bothering with the start menu. I’m sure if I played with the Keyboard Manager a bit more I could probably go for something like Super/Win+Shift+Enter and skip Run or PowerToys Run altogether. I just haven’t bothered for whatever reason.
On my one remaining Windows machine, I installed PowerToys and use the “Run” launcher. Alt+Space opens Run. If you lead with a . you’ll search programs. Alt+Space, .term, for example, should immediately show Terminal and you can slap enter to open it. You can also do stuff like = 1 + 1 or = 0b101 + 0xf for quick calculations, % for unit conversion (%% 10MB to Mb), etc. It’s not KRunner, dmenu, etc but it definitely beats the hell out of the start menu.
PowerToys “Keyboard Manager” might let you reclaim some shortcuts as well. I used it to swap Caps Lock and Escape but I’m pretty sure it can be used to create custom shortcuts. There’s also some option to remap shortcuts on a program specific basis. So you can say Alt+T should send Ctrl+T but only when Firefox has focus, for example. Haven’t messed with it myself but I can see the value.
Still looking forward to ditching Windows entirely but, in the meantime, MS has some decent tools that aren’t included by default and don’t seem to be advertised because power users aren’t the target market and “they already know to look for it” I guess.
I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I’d grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can’t find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.
Some of us are old enough to remember when “that command terminal thing” was computing. Now there’s something about text on a black screen that seems to make people’s eyes glaze over and their brains turn off today. You’d think they were being asked to decipher the Matrix. Too many generations removed I suppose.
The reality is I’m definitely not figuring out how my compositor works, almost never touching system files, infrequently scripting, and almost always using “a tool NOW for a SPECIFIC thing.” I’m not a tech luddite. Modern computing is shiny and awesome. You want graphical tools for graphical tasks. But there are so many excellent specific-purpose CLI tools, typically included by default across nearly every distro, that make so much more sense to use over a GUI. Maybe not always but most of the time.
Simple example, damned if I’m gonna open a file browser, navigate to my downloads directory, right click - Cut (or Ctrl X), navigate to another directory, paste, then right click - Rename. Not when I can just open a terminal (realistically, I always have it open) and mv ~/downloads/kewlwallpapers_abstract_dark_blah_blah.jpg ~/pics/wallpaper/abstract_003.jpg Especially when tab completion means I just have to type a partial path or filename and slap Tab to fill in the rest. It’s just so quick.
I hate it because I don’t know how to do anything
Some examples of what you’ve been unable to accomplish might add clarity.
but I’m not smart enough to learn terminal
Bull. Shit. You’re just not used to it and, even without picking up any knowledge of shell scripting, you’re only a man somecommand away from understanding what specific command line programs do. somecommand --flag --another-flag /home/me/thing typically isn’t much different from opening some GUI app on Windows, ticking two boxes, opening the file picker and selecting C:\users\me\thing then clicking a button.
All that said, now we really need examples because there’s probably no need for you to be messing with the terminal to begin with. At least not if you aren’t doing anything outside basic computing like web browsing, chat, productivity tasks and such. So what are you trying to do in the terminal that the OS failed to provide a GUI for?
Flatpaks… NOOOOO…
I haven’t used Zorin but flatpaks are enabled by default if I understand. Yes, you can install them via the command line but it looks like you could just open the built in software center and search for whatever it is you want. The only exception I can imagine is if you’re trying to install from a source other than whatever Zorin uses by default (Flathub, I would guess).
dependencies not found
With Flatpaks? Wat? With some other command? Context, please.
Anytime I have to use terminal I ALWAYS make a backup
You’re competent enough to image and restore your drive but not stay out of trouble in your OS? You presumably had to learn whatever software, and the underlying concepts, you’re using for that. Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, Macrium Reflect, etc all exist to make it easier but you’ve gotta know what an “image” is, what it means create it and subsequently write it onto a drive. How to identify the correct drive so you’re not wiping out something unintentionally.
So, are you not spending even a few minutes to check if the code snippets you’re pasting are applicable to your specific distribution? At least skimming the man page for the commands you try to run? Are you assuming “it’s all just Linux, right?” and that there isn’t nuance between distributions? Running shell commands you don’t understand is like running whatever backup solution you’re using without understanding it - just blindly clicking buttons and maybe you get a backup or maybe you format a drive and lose decades of family photos, your research paper draft, and whatever else. And if a fuckup costs me a literal day of my life in restoration time, I’m making it a point to use that time to figure out why so I hopefully don’t repeat the process in the future.
There’s little substance in your complaints and I’m left just so genuinely confused. In my head I’m imagining a walking talking XY Problem. Some specific examples of what you were trying to achieve or the snippets you were blindly pasting might shed some light but, left to guess, your actions sound akin to gamer kids running random batch scripts claiming to tweak power settings or whatever else in order to eke out a few extra FPS. Windows isn’t going to protect anyone who treats it the same way you have seemingly treated Linux.
I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.
It’s less relatable now, and the technology was fucking stupid to begin with, but: Imagine printing out a document and feeding the sheets into a fax machine instead of just sending the file directly to the machine.
Or using a cassette tape adapter to play music from your phone through a stereo system when that system has a built-in Aux port you could plug directly into (“Useless Use Of Cassette?”).
cat’ing into grep, and a handful of other programs people commonly pipe into from cat, is pointless when grep can be called directly against a file. cat is being run for no reason; a useless use of cat (uuoc). It means fuckall for most people today but I imagine it could’ve been an actual concern when hardware was much more limited and multiple users were connecting to a single system.