Of course you can just forget about the terminal and only use GUI applications but where's the fun in that? At the end of the day the Linux terminal so popular for 3 reasons:
Flexibility
Automation
Speed
Customization
Imagine having a folder with 200+ files inside. Next imagine trying to to search for a specific file within the folder but not knowing the name. It'll be a pain opening every single file one by one to find the correct one. Now with the terminal, all we have to enter a single command (including a few options) to find that one file quickly! All you have to type in is:
grep -inR "hello" . 
From the output in the terminal we can determine that the keyword "hello" is in the file called "testing18.txt".
Don't worry too much about that for now, I'll explain it later on! On the other hand, if we want to hide a folder or a file from someone we can simple rename it with a "." at the beginning; later on we can view the file with:
ls -lah 
And it'll show us our hidden file! This is what I mean by flexibility. The possibilities are endless!
In regards to automation, relatively anything can be automated with scripts or cronjobs within Linux; however, it is rather complicated for beginner. Don't worry though, I'm already planning on a post solely on automation!
There are various technical reasons as to why Linux is faster but I'm not going into those reasons. I, however, believe that Linux is faster is because:
It's open-source. This means that all the code is available for you, and anybody, to modify. This is important because even if someone were to see an error in the code, another person could identify it and fix/optimize it.
Resource usage. Firstly, Linux is very lightweight while Windows is very bloated and runs a lot of programs in the background.
Lastly, by customization I mean you can turn a simple looking desktop to something that looks and feels more comfortable to you. You switch everything from file managers, to browsers, to terminal emulators, to default behaviors. For example this is my desktop and shell configuration compared to the default that came with Debian 11 KDE edition.
