Many people have the misconception that if you use Linux, you have to know how to use the terminal. This is simply not true. But having a decent knowledge about the terminal definitely makes your Linux experience a bit easier and interesting. So let us learn about 3 very useful terminal commands that would make your experience a bit better on Linux.
Neofetch -
'Neofetch' is a utility that lets you see your system information in a very nice way in the terminal itself. So you do not have to install any other programs to see your system information. To use neofetch, open up the terminal, type neofetch, and hit enter. This will make a logo of your distro from letters and other different characters and your whole system information would be listed just beside it.
Note - If neofetch is not installed on your system, you can install it by using the command sudo apt install neofetch (for Debian-based distros) or sudo pacman -S neofetch (for Arch-based distros).
HTOP -
HTOP is a utility that lets you monitor your system resource usage (CPU consumption, Memory Consumption, etc). It is a more superior utility than the basic top command. You can see all individual processes running in your system as well as the detailed resource consumption by each process. This can be very helpful in case of troubleshooting high resource usage as it will help catch the culprit that is using high system resources. It is also very useful for general resource monitoring. To use htop, just type htop in the terminal and press enter.
Note - If htop is not installed on your system, you can install it by using the command sudo apt install htop (for Debian-based distros) or sudo pacman -S htop (for Arch-based distros).
VAINFO -
VAINFO is a utility that tells you which codecs are supported by your system. It also gives you information on the GPU driver installed on the system and the VA-API version. VA-API is developed by Intel and provides hardware video encoding and decoding for different media formats. VAINFO also tells you which codecs are hardware-accelerated and which are not. If a codec has VAEntrypointVLD written beside it then your system supports hardware acceleration for that codec.
You can use vainfo by typing vainfo in the terminal and pressing enter.
We have made an entire blog on how to enable hardware-accelerated video decode in Pop!_OS (Intel Graphics). You can check it out from here.
Note - If vainfo is not installed on your system, you can install it by using the command sudo apt install vainfo (for Debian-based distros) or sudo pacman -S libva-utils (for Arch-based distros).
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