Using Linux means—sooner or later—using the command line. But typing commands in the terminal window can be slow and repetitive. These keyboard tips will turbo-charge your terminal window experience. The Command Line Linux is a command-line operating system. You can choose to drop a desktop environment on top of it, such as the GNOME or KDE desktop environments, but still, underneath, there’s the text interface that hasn’t really changed since the days of the first Unix implementations in the 1970s.