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For software, something that plays nice with Linux.

For hardware, the M2 Air is a divine machine.

Ah, TIL! I was looking for that setting in the WiFi settings, since I only wanted it on one access point (to avoid loopback NAT issues).

I've had way more plug-and-play success with USB-serial devices under Linux than Windows. Maybe just me though...

I think an issue is that people tend to think of Linux as meaning "all distributions." So if something is compatible with X distro version yy.zz, the general idea is "it's compatible with Linux." This, in my experience, is one of the things that leads to mandatory command-line usage

it definitely is possible to get it to work under a different flavor of Linux, but it's not necessarily easy if you're uncomfortable with a command line.

Another is drivers

if it's mainlined, it will Just Work, but if it's not...well, it may work, but you might have to jump through hoops and get busy with the command line.

In short: if you view your distro the same way you view a particular Windows release, then I really don't think you need the command line for desktop Linux. But you need to accept that some software isn't "compatible," in the above, user-friendly sense of the word.

For wifi, I was pleasantly surprised that I could set a custom DNS on iOS while still using DHCP for other settings. Can only set DNS on Android if I use manual IP (or just use Wireguard).

Edit: not true, Android can have custom DNS with DHCP, see below.

My favorite systemd moment was when my (headless) box hung at boot...because I didn't have a USB drive plugged in. The drive was listed in fstab, which was never an issue before. But without nofail, it was suddenly worth stopping the boot process.

I see kernel panics at shutdown most often on Arch-based distros after updating system packages.

When I tried Arch, upgrading kernel would delete the kernel modules of the running kernel

somewhat unimpressive upgrade process.

Linux and Mac users can hold on to a little piece of that history with the wonderful xscreensaver suite (its author, jwz, was a Netscape dude).

I know it's just a meme, but an OBDII dongle

even a cheap $10 Bluetooth one

is super useful. You can read and reset the codes, and watch stats in real-time if so inclined.

Yeah, good point

I just copy-paste this from my response to another post where OP wanted tips am migrating to a CLI-centric workflow. Different question from this OP.

First thing I'd do is ditch the GUI file manager: get comfortable with cd, ls, mv, rm, etc.

After that, maybe start with basic text manipulation, like grep, awk, sort, uniq, etc. This ties in nicely with IO redirection, which is essential for a "CLI based workflow." Get comfortable with pipes and file redirection, it's extremely powerful!

Writing shell scripts is another super useful exercise: any time you find yourself running the same set of commands multiple times, think about making it a shell script. You may end up with some really useful little custom tools that way.

If I'm really tired, sometimes I'll just dose off in the midd