I took a single-semester Linux course and had the terminal down pat.
Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean by this? It sounds a little like you’re implying mastery of the rather vague “terminal.” Do you mean everything in the terminal? Or just a common shell, like bash? Or some common cli tools?
I ask because it seems like you’re suggesting that you can master the unix terminal in just a semester while you learn new important things that affect your workflow in your office suite regularly. I agree with you in regard to the office suite, but vis-a-vis the terminal… I have spent my entire life working in it, and, while I’m very comfortable, I still learn new things that affect my workflow every week at minimum.
But I fear that I’m misunderstanding you here, which is why I ask.
I mean use of the CLI on Linux generally. I used “terminal” vaguely because the original comment used it vaguely. “Down pat” is to say that I’m perfectly comfortable with it, namely that the course taught me:
How to execute programs from the shell (and interrupt execution/kill processes).
How to navigate and alter the filesystem, search for files and their contents, etc.
How to install, remove, and configure software.
How to set aliases.
How to write shell scripts.
How to edit files (although 99% of the time this is useless; I’ll just use something like Kate instead).
How to parse and interpret program output.
How to read man pages.
Generally how to do anything I couldn’t/wouldn’t prefer to do from a GUI instead.
I use the shell vastly more than 99.99% of people and haven’t had a problem with or changed how I interact with it since that course; that to me is “down pat” for the terminal itself. I don’t care if I don’t know every application and flag ever made, because that’s not the point – like knowing how to use a GUI doesn’t mean you’ve memorized all GUI software, just that you know how to interpret the design language of and successfully use new GUI software. If I need to do something my current tools can’t, I can just search for the right program and use the man page to quickly write a command.
Meanwhile, with something like LibreOffice Calc, which I understand is much less feature-rich than the industry standard Excel, I don’t just learn about new functions like CORREL(), akin to what I said before about learning new CLI applications; I fundamentally learn how to create and edit spreadsheets more quickly. In Impress, I still learn how to make presentations more appealing, more readable, etc. Basically things that aren’t just rote memorization of gadgets that I could look up at any time. That’s what sets it apart to me – the fact that anything I don’t already know about the Linux terminal is present in readily available reference material and better off not memorized.
Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean by this? It sounds a little like you’re implying mastery of the rather vague “terminal.” Do you mean everything in the terminal? Or just a common shell, like bash? Or some common cli tools?
I ask because it seems like you’re suggesting that you can master the unix terminal in just a semester while you learn new important things that affect your workflow in your office suite regularly. I agree with you in regard to the office suite, but vis-a-vis the terminal… I have spent my entire life working in it, and, while I’m very comfortable, I still learn new things that affect my workflow every week at minimum.
But I fear that I’m misunderstanding you here, which is why I ask.
I mean use of the CLI on Linux generally. I used “terminal” vaguely because the original comment used it vaguely. “Down pat” is to say that I’m perfectly comfortable with it, namely that the course taught me:
I use the shell vastly more than 99.99% of people and haven’t had a problem with or changed how I interact with it since that course; that to me is “down pat” for the terminal itself. I don’t care if I don’t know every application and flag ever made, because that’s not the point – like knowing how to use a GUI doesn’t mean you’ve memorized all GUI software, just that you know how to interpret the design language of and successfully use new GUI software. If I need to do something my current tools can’t, I can just search for the right program and use the man page to quickly write a command.
Meanwhile, with something like LibreOffice Calc, which I understand is much less feature-rich than the industry standard Excel, I don’t just learn about new functions like
CORREL(), akin to what I said before about learning new CLI applications; I fundamentally learn how to create and edit spreadsheets more quickly. In Impress, I still learn how to make presentations more appealing, more readable, etc. Basically things that aren’t just rote memorization of gadgets that I could look up at any time. That’s what sets it apart to me – the fact that anything I don’t already know about the Linux terminal is present in readily available reference material and better off not memorized.