For those of you helping all the newbies, what was it like before you got comfortable? What resources or environment or conditions were crucial for getting to the next level?

THANK YOU!

Decades ago I thought I was SO COOL for burning and installing Ubuntu live CDs. But needing the Command Line Interface for anything was like a wall. I had no skill or focus.

Today I have the right computer and blacked out my keyboard. I am half way through The Linux Command Line and chat GPT has been hugely helpful. Progress feels good. Still,
- most of my habits are not best practice
- still mashing arrow keys in vim and bash
- can't grep or find yet; still using the gui a lot
- man pages feel unreadable to me
- building short scripts with chat gpt and no real automation; most of the stuff I try without it fails.
- weak git understanding. Can't connect to github.
- not sure how to mesh with the linux community or normies for that matter. I don't like social apps.
- Wish I had focused on this back in high school.

My goal for a very long time has been to self-host some web services, and make a crude chat bot that draws from ALL of my files and can sort-of survive on its own. I'm starting closer to first principles so I / it can control the stack. A year ago I thought I was five years away. Now, maybe more like 50 years away. My career and most of my time is not with computers.

Again, thank you so much!!

I started on computers when a command line interface was the only thing available. But there was no single standard, and differences would often be difficult to remember.

Anyway, let me explain something about why vim is the way it is. Back when "vi" was developed, you had a ridiculously diverse amount of different terminals and *nix computers. Keyboards would have different layouts of special keys, and often the special keys you needed weren't even there. And often things were configured incompletely so the special keys didn't work.

With vi, you only needed to locate one special key - Esc - and once you found it you could use vi.

Fast forward 3+ decades and today there's no such problem. Pretty much every keyboard conforms to a standard layout, with all the major special keys present and in the same places. But vim (based on vi) remains the same as it ever was just because.

Sorry 'bout that.

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I joined a distro team and the developer taught me. Win win for both. I help with testing and installs. Admin the forum.

I have the mechanical gene also where manuals make sense to me also. Just changed streamtuner2 preferences from mp3blaster to xmms. Listening to North Mississippi All Stars.

Edit. My thing is not computers also. I repair motorcycles for a living.

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Started with DOS/CPM back in the 80s. So always used to a command line. That's all we had when Linux first got going, so all command-line. Always felt 'natural'... That said, we have people coming out schools that are 'mouse cripples' even in Windows. It is sad actually as the command line is so powerful and easy to use.

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When I started, there were no GUIs. But, all Operating Systems came with very good printed manuals. Having those were far better than what exists on the WEB even now.

The Best was Wang Labs DOS and Coherent OS. Those Manuals had me fully prepared for Linux and BSDs when they came into existence.

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Started out before GUIs were the norm, mid to late 90s, & I wasn't very quick to learn the basics, although I used to use MS DOS, things were so different...

Just tried to do regular computer things at the command line, but still not very good with command line web browsers, prefer using graphical...

When I started, we had man pages or printed books, couldn't afford to use the internet, only had dial up connection through a modem.

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i am guilty to some of those still xD

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I worked with CLIs of various types for 30 years before I saw a GUI. My first reaction to a GUI was that it was a nuisance maze to click here and then click there until I guessed the pathway to click on whatever it was I wanted to do.

To answer the question: The first computer I ran hands on was an IBM 1440. It was controlled by a combination of CLI, toggle switches, and punch cards. I learned by reading the manual and asking the two other people in the company who understood the machine.

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/1440/A...nual_Oct66.pdf

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My computer experience started with IBM-1130 and punchcards only. (At least we had a keypunch machine and did not have to manually punch the cards. I graduated to BASIC on a Interact Model J 16K, then to CP/M, then CP/M-86, and finally to IBM-DOS 1.1! NOWHERE in there was there in interface that was not CLI! I went on to use VSPC, MS-DOS versions 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (and the ghost of 7 that came under Win98), HP-UX and all of those from the CLI. I was a grizzled old Programmer, Network Engineer, Systems Administrator, and Database Administrator before I ever saw a GUI interface. (Novell, Windows Server based upon Win98 for business with the Novell TCP/IP networking stack installed. Oh lord, packet drivers!)

You want advice on learning the CLI? Immersion. Run Anti-X for a while, or get used to looking up commands and then working from the CLI on your current distribution. Go to the GUI when you need to web browse, display video, or use a service that does not lend itself to CLI use but otherwise live on the command line. (There are Curses (text) based web browsers, but very few Web sites are so advanced as to render properly as text in any useful way.) Living in it is how you get to know it really well.

PS. The term "best practices" is one used by vendors that means "do it our way so I make more money" and has little or nothing to do with the best way to do things for your purpose or business.

PPS. I saw where another gizzled old geek (GOG, I should trademark that. Oh, wait, never mind.) advanced the option that it is core to a basic misunderstanding between tech and management. Tech are innovators, while management have MBAs. To an MBA the term "industry standard" means dependable. When there is a meeting and the management says they want to do things the "industry standard" way the innovators hear "let's throw away our competitive advantage and do it just like everyone else until the bankruptcy court locks the doors" and management cannot understand why they push back.

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My first CLI was an IDE for the BASIC programming language. The more correct term for it at the time would have been the keyboard monitor.

The crucial tool for learning it was the BASIC-PLUS LANGUAGE MANUAL. And when that was not enough, there was no online help or public forum where you could ask questions. There was literally just the computer room, which had terminals and a shelf of printed manuals, plus whoever else happened to be in the room at the time.

Strictly speaking, there was a HELP command – but it typed the lyrics to the Beatles song.

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Hmmm. CLI from the “start”… after punch cards anyway. I was a keypunch operator in those days…
Text-based terminals on Wang VS and Burroughs 1900 (CANDE). Wordstar and BASIC on a Kaypro CPM luggable.
Spent several years crunching LINC code on Burroughs/Unisys mainframes on and for text-based terminals.

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My first exposure to "GUIs" was when I purchased my first Macintosh – which by the way I still have. And then, I did quite a lot of work in "the professional graphics world" which never cared in the slightest for "a command-line" because it never encountered it.

Meanwhile, as the MS-DOS based world simultaneously crawled forward, first we had: win.exe "Yes, there was MS-DOS under there." Until finally we reached the platform that Microsoft called, "NT = New Technology." Which finally began to move forward to what we have today.

Over these many years, I have worked with many "command-line interfaces." Because, for the most part, "this was all we had." And, when you look upon any "vim-or-whatever" today, please do not forget the "24-line by 80-column terminal." From which all of this was birthed. (Hey, it was a pretty major step forward when you could "position the cursor!")

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I started out with computers in the DOS 3.x days, so I was comfortable with the command line long before I started using Linux. It was just a matter of learning new commands. I found valuable resources for doing so at The Linux Documentation Project. (Sadly, development at TLDP seems to have stalled, but it's a valuable resource and I'm glad it's still available. I still have a copy of Garrels's Bash Guide for Beginners on my bookshelf.)

I want to add one comment on why vim is the way it is.

I read that, when it was created long before the PC came along, many users connected to main frames via phones (also, many of what we consider today's "keyboard conventions" were not conventions yet). One of the goals of the vi developers was to minimize keystrokes (and, hence, telephone time); that's why the commands are so terse. (Indeed, I had a coworker in the late 1970s who connected in that way; he had a special cradle that he put his telephone handset in when he wanted to connect to some mainframe on the other side of town.)

I can't remember where I read that, but I found it persuasive.

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That was called an acoustic coupler. It commonly supported a transmission rate of 0.00011 megabits per second, or even less.

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