find the directory

Many tools to help facilitate that. locate, find (or easier syntax fd), tree, ls, grep, ln and various shell builtins.

exe shortcut equivalent

Perhaps you want to search $PATH directories.

There’s typically a reason things are the way they are, and not always legacy cruft no longer relevant. If something seems odd or inconvenient compared to what you’re used to, it may be because it has other advantages being that way.

För first part, its pathetically hard to find the directory and more over out a program shortcut so that it can immediately start at computer start in Linux because the directory is not existent and there is no exe shortcut equivalent in Linux to out in that directory

OUCH btw. That was really painful to read. XD

Also,

find the directory

Perhaps you want Gobo Linux, which has a different file tree arrangement perhaps more familiar and forgiving to those who’ve grown accustomed to how windows does things. (Almost certainly better off learning the more conventional ways though, even with how more unfamiliar as they may be to start with.)

Or perhaps you want the freedesktop XDG .desktop files directory? *shrug*

Or… just use the command line (or something like dmenu), if you know the name of the command you want to launch. It’s faster. … Or then eventually perhaps set up keybind shortcuts to launch things you want regularly and fast.

Or… o_O I suppose, if you really want… you could issue 1 command to make a directory of symlinks to all the executables in $PATH… something like mkdir ~/exes ; find $(echo $PATH | tr ':' ' ') -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -exec ln -s {} ~/exes/ \; (countless ways to do that… I just plucked the 2nd suggestion from an LLM, since the way I would have done it would have been using Fish… and that’s more bash/posix compliant, more universal.) But I’m not sure why you would want that. GNU+Linux is full of little programs, from the unix philosophy of “do one thing, well”, and it’d just be a lot of clutter in one dir, for what you can already access more cleanly and easily just from the command line and tab-completion (or even more completion advantages in ZSH and Fish).

Also, if you’re not yet familiar with what tool does the job you seek to have done, you may strike lucky using the apropos command to help you find which command does what you need done.

Then of course all the various GUI tools to help you find things.

Secondly if you connect an HDD , it’s instantly available to copy and to read FROM any and all apps in windows.this is very very hard in Linux , I connected externe HDD but I had do “mounting” to use it in media manager to even say save media here.

Which distro and desktop environment have you tried this on? Many pre-install the things to make that “just work”. For some users, this is a feature that it does not do that. Learning how to use mount and lsblock (and grep) is handy, more awareness, control, fidelity, transferable skills, etc, than just having it do it for you and leaving you oblivious to what’s happening, to atrophy further from being able and eager to “give back”. Remember, it’s Free Software, largely made by users volunteering their contributions to improve the code… it’s good to learn.

Apart from being trivial to these things in windows,

It’s also trivial in some distros with their preconfiguration, and in some desktop environments, and also trivial once you install/configure things in more barebones distro installs.

See, Linux is not just one thing. Can’t judge it all by one experience. It’s free software… it’s the freedom. It’s not “the one true way” imposed upon you. It’s good to explore this, and feel the neurons grow. ;)

there is some firing telling how to do it on their own distro usi g Terminal.

I struggle to parse that. “some firing telling”?

I mean come on, who want to use terminal in 2026 as a regular user and for regular use.

MANY people. It’s understandable, coming from windows, thinking that the terminal is some inferior ancient thing. It’s not like that on linux. Maybe if Bash is unappealing, try ZSH with Oh-My-ZSH, or even go straight to using Fish (Friendly interactive shell), for something even more convenient and humanable.

It may surprise, but often the terminal is faster than a GUI.

It’s also a universal interface. Text.

This makes documentation easier and more consistent. Where GUI instructions are a long series of click this and click that and so on, requiring the user to look for the things to click, and hoping they remain consistent (which they’re probably not), it can leave the user stuck. Whereas with text commands, you can copy and paste, and get the whole thing done in one. And can even investigate each of the parts to learn about it even more, further empowering the user.

I remember one of the coolest things to discover on my Linux honeymoon, was pipes. You can pipe commands together. This makes it tremendously powerful. It’s like language, able to form complex combinations of commands, like putting words together to form sentences, allowing the user the freedom to have the computer do what they want. Contrast that to a GUI which only allows the user to do what the programmer allows them to do.

https://www.youtube.com/@BreadOnPenguins is one example of a user showing off some of the power of the command line. :)

Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A4bs40scSo ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNLGVFsQmsg ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7GrT2jOy4Q ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duKXvHa1HMs ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5BoVPhewWM ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x22k3csfJCo ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCqOgWR0g2o ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyd6Lxy1IuE ; and on and on it goes.

https://xkcd.com/1205/ … It’s worth the time:

Admit it Linux bros; Linux sux.

n_n Amusingly, “Linux sucks” has been the title of a recurring series of articles/videos from at least a couple free software advocates/journalists. n_n It’s not about that though is it, true or not… It’s the freedom. Quality of software/experience is a secondary concern. Sure, it may be true that the freedom allows better software to be made, but that’s not a guarantee, and we can’t get there without the freedom. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ is worth exploring.

Most celebrated- 4% market share for Linux os

Are we doing argumentum-populum there? The merits lay elsewhere. I wonder what % use Ironclad has… maybe 0.000,000,001%? But it’s still of merit. And how many users when Richard Stallman started the GNU Project, or how many users when Torvalds started the Linux kernel… See? Not really a worthwhile measure is it.

• is hardly any measure of usefulness and I doubt it will go beyond measly 5-7%.

But if you insist… Check out how much a % share for servers. ;) ;p

And, it does look like it wont top out at around 7%. The trajectory has been increasing in recent years, such that it’s near doubled… I’d be interested to hear what you base your doubt upon. Some (weak) measures suggest it’s already passed 6%.

(Tried to find a server specific image I’d seen (I think) on Lemmy, but failed to find it… but found this one instead…)

Until Linux stops , fix problems by Terminal, and be actually usefull.

?

If Linux stops (as in the kernel development ceases (~ which seems wildly implausible)), there are still the BSDs, Solaris derivatives, Ironclad, Hurd, and other kernels, and dozens of completely other operating systems not even in the UNIX paradigm, like AROS and Kolibrios and TempleOS and Plan9, and on and on, and plenty enthusiasts who may yet start other projects entirely new, or rekindle the likes of IRIX with a free software license. Linux is just a kernel that slots into the GNU system (or non-GNU, or Android, or embeded, or others).

Most important take-away from this long reply:

Even in 2026, the command line’s advantages over GUI are still strong and persisting and growing in usefulness more than GUI. The terminal is not inferior, and that’s why it is not going away. It’s very well worth the time invested in learning.

… I’ve saved so much time, I had the time free to leisurely write this long reply. ;)

…

Oh, and PS: as for your original challenge, to which I said there are too many variables… most things that need to be on startup, will be added to startup, by the package manager, when you install it… so… that’s easier. Then, so many ways to do it after that, be it via your init system (copy-pasta a pre-existing startup script in /etc/init.d for sysvinit, or service file in /etc/systemd/service for systemd, or script in /etc/sv for runit, etc., and edit the program name, and run the couple init system specific commands to enable it, which in runit’s case, is just a chmod and ln -s… all of which can be scripted up for even greater convenience over control), or just add it to your bash profile, or to your GUI autostart, or set it up in a startup cron, or, other ways… Nice to have that much choice and control over your software. :D “Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the user.” :)

I don’t miss that time. Especially on laptops that weren’t supported by the manufacturer and you had to hunt for individual drivers.

Today that only happens if you run Linux and have an Nvidia card. Especially one that’s not supported by the newest driver version anymore.

I skipped 2000, but I installed XP a lot of times and I never had to insert a floppy. IDE and SATA drivers were preloaded, maybe you had some really weird storage system?

I think with cheaper consumer desktops using IDE hard drives, that worked out of the box, but some more exotic storage configurations (SCSI, anything to do with RAID) were a little bit harder to get going.

What forums? In 2005 every forum I went to was really helpful, friendly, and nothing like what you describe.

Certainly there was a little bit of internet snarkiness I would imagine, but I remember everyone being pretty nice to each other.

I decided to go back and look using the way back machine and went through a few threads, everyone is being really nice and helpful to each other.

Try Reddit or Stackoverflow for a contrasting experience.

Being told to read the manual did me good.

We should bring back RTFM, and cease allowing it to be smeared as something bad. Burnout is no fun. RTFM spares developers from burnout, allowing them to continue developing good software (and have it be well documented… if only users would read the flippin manual!) ;D

Not as much as we have to now.

I’m usually a Windows shield-bearer around these parts, because it’s not quite as much of a dumpster fire as people say (please for the love of god don’t debate me on this, I prefer Linux and have better things to do), but this is inarguably something Windows has gotten far far worse at. Out of the box experience (besides having to shove drivers into the install media) used to be a pretty definitive thing that Windows beat Linux on. Install and it “just werkd”. It used to be the cornerstone of pushback, that Linux required you to tinker and Windows didn’t. But Microsoft destroyed their lead in that so they only have (fast dwindling) business appeal and entrenchment to lean on now.

apt and synaptic is not really user friendly though. but something based on packagekit can show a better program ctalog, and even provide automatic updates, or even just reminders that there are new updates.

No, they definitely should.