Getting Around the Desktop and Terminal

A quick orientation to Raspberry Pi OS — whether you're looking at the graphical desktop or, as this course mostly uses, just the terminal.

You'll need: your Pi, connected via the SSH session from Lesson rpi-04 (or a monitor/keyboard directly attached, if you chose the full desktop image and prefer that).

If you're looking at the graphical desktop, it will feel broadly familiar — a taskbar, a file manager, a few pre-installed applications, and a menu to launch more. This course focuses on the terminal instead, for one practical reason: nearly everything you'll do — writing scripts, controlling GPIO, running services — happens more directly and more repeatably from the command line, and the exact same terminal commands work identically whether you're sitting at the desktop or connected headless over SSH.

A few orientation basics for the terminal itself:

• You're dropped into your home directory (/home/pi on most setups) by default when you connect.
• The prompt itself (commonly ending in $) shows your username, the Pi's hostname, and your current directory.
• Commands are typed and run with Enter; most produce plain text output directly below where you typed.

The next lesson covers the specific commands you'll use constantly; this one is just about feeling oriented before diving into them.