With Mint containing a complete suite of graphical tools, one may wonder why it is useful to learn and use the terminal at all. Depending on the type of user, learning how to execute commands in a terminal may or may not be beneficial. If you are a user who intends to use Linux only for basic purposes such as browsing the Internet, checking e-mails, playing games, editing documents, printing, watching videos, listening to music, and so on, terminal commands may not be a useful skill to learn as all of these activities (as well as others) are best handled by a graphical desktop environment.

However, the real value of the terminal in Linux comes with advanced administration. Some administrative activities are faster using shell commands than using the GUI. For example, if you wanted to edit the /etc/fstab file, it would take fewer steps to type sudo nano /etc/fstab than it would to open a file manager with root permissions, navigate to the /etc directory, find...