Oh, great! Why did they do that? So if I run it in an earlier version like 8 then it should work? And if I end up having to use 11, what exactly do I need to get for FX to work - is there a separate installer or something?

Because text commands can be automated with a script.
Yes, not relevant for one-time use. But Linux is primarily used by developers, who often desire reproducibility.
But the GUI system consumes lots of resources with little benefit for a server deployment.
Again, "developers, developers, developers", to quote an erstwhile Microsoft CEO.

There are numerous posts and tutorials covering that.
Perhaps have a look at the Getting Started page at openjfx.io.

Alternatively: Stick to Swing.

I really need the JavaFX program to also work, but I'll look at your link.

Depends if you want the persistent session or not; Puppy Linux can live in RAM.

You mean look up what button you need to find in the first place, then find it in a nest of menus, and then make sure you select all the correct options and dropdown list thingies. Same thing pretty much, except that a few keystrokes can include way more information than you can fit in your typical GUI on a screen. We use tab completion, so we don't need to remember the exact path. Even the simplest setups allow you to get far by just remembering the first letter or two and hitting tab -- twice, if there's more than one possible completion candidate. Some shells optionally support much deeper tab completion where I can type just pieces of a deeply nested directory hierarchy and get the exact file I want.

Say I type d/wp32/pain/c/gog/pain and hit TAB. My shell just expanded it to ds1/wp32/painkiller/drive_c/GOG\ Games/Painkiller\ Black/ and now I can hit TAB again to see a list of files, realize the thing I want is under Bin so I type b and hit TAB again twice, and now I see a list of files under Bin so I type en and hit TAB once more and I get the final path I wanted: ds1/wp32/painkiller/drive_c/GOG\ Games/Painkiller\ Black/Bin/Engine.dll

Just a few keystrokes. I can navigate directory hierarchies dozens of levels deep, with hundreds and thousands of files or subdirectories in each. I don't spend much time scrolling around trying to visually locate that one file or folder in a huge list. And this is just one way to get to stuff quick.

EDIT: for another example, say I know I want engine.dll but I have no idea where it is. So I type locate -i engine.dll and I get a list of all files named such, and then I can just copy & paste the path (or quickly type parts of it and expand it using tab as above) It's not that difficult when the thing you need to double-click is already right in front of you. You forget to consider the stage where you're scrolling through files and directories and menus and everything, navigating a 2D maze and visually locating things in order to reach that one thing you wanted to double-click. We don't need to locate it when we use the command line, we just ask for it. "hammer please"

Then we get things like shell history, directory stack, etc. so reaching the thing we used recently becomes very very quick. Instead of going through the same damn menus over and over again, we can just pull a command from the shell's history with a few keystrokes.

Maybe check your package manager before. On Debian there's an openjfx package. As far as I remember Mint is based on Debian/Ubuntu, so maybe that package is available on Mint too:

openjfx - JavaFX/OpenJFX - Rich client application platform for Java

I've never used JavaFX, but maybe that solves your problem.

clarry, well I didn't know it had the tab feature, but I've been typing stuff completely. You seem to mix a bunch of /s and \s in the same path. Is there a reason for that or does it signify anything? And in a window with a long list of files, you can sort them alphabetically, and type the first character to jump to that position in the list (at least in Windows you can).

eiii, thanks for the tip - I'll definitely look into that! I hadn't realized there's something called OpenJFX.

The (forward) slash is a separator between directories. The backslash is an escape character, in this case used to prevent the shell from breaking up the path on spaces into multiple unrelated arguments. You would use the same character to escape any other character that has a special meaning in the shell when you want to suppress that meaning. (Two kinds of quotes can also be used for similar effect) Yeah, you already understand how using the keyboard can speed up getting to stuff.

If I may, if I were you, I would seriously consider some google-fu or duckduckgo-fu at this point. GOG kidya gaming forums and users might seem like the best source of valid information about Linux in an easily condensable way, but alas, it is not.

If anything, this thread is proof of that.

Stack Exchange, r/linux4noobs, hell, almost anywhere else is going to be more worthwhile of your time at this point.

Though you seem to be close, even if all over the place.

But it's only pressing like 1 key to jump around, not actually typing a bunch of stuff. Anyway, I didn't realize the \ was used that way on a command line, but that's good to know. I've been just putting things between 'these'.

EDIT: rojimboo, I just saw your post. Anyway, yeah I know, but honestly, people here tend to give me the best information, and genuinely want to be helpful, whereas if I go somewhere like Stack Overflow they're all horrible and anal about everything. In any case, I think my only remaining problem at this point is getting the WiFi to work (and I still have to test the Java, and possibly change the version and/or install JavaFX).

The slowness isn't just the the computer; it can be the thing in between the chair and input device (in other words, the user). I find it much faster to type a command than to use a mouse to locate what I'm looking for on the screen, for example.

Tab completion helps; given just the first few letters of a command or file name, pressing tab will complete the rest (if that doesn't work, there are multiple possibilities and a second tab will list them). No need to interrupt the command to do a "ls" to figure out the name of the file you're looking for when the tab key can do that.

I believe double-clicking can be difficult for some users, or for some (less common) input devices.

Linux actually separates the actions of combing multiple files and compressing them (though .tar.gz files are common enough that many tools, including the tar command, allow decompression and extraction in a single step).

The .gz extension is gzip, a program that compresses just a single file. If you have a file that you don't need to access much, and you want to compress it to save space, you can call the gzip command on it. Note that this only works for a single file.

The .tar extension stands for "Tape ARchive", which dates back to the days when it was common to store backups on tape. .tar files are not compressed; rather, these files just consist of a bunch of files glued together, with an index of what files are present. You could call it a filesystem, but it's much simpler, and is optimized for storing files and not actually using them, hence why you have to extract them to use them. (You actually can put a .tar file directly onto a USB device without a filesystem; this is useful in the rare situation where you need to transfer files that would fit on the device if it weren't for the space overhead of a real filesystem.)

So, you can tar up a bunch of files, then run gzip on the entire archive, and you get a .tar.gz file. (You may encounter .tar.bz2 and .tar.xz; these are similar, but differ in that a more powerful but slower compression algorithm is used.)

Well I understand your point about text being easier in some cases, and I wasn't ever trying to imply that it never is. In fact, I find autocomplete very quick when I'm writing code. But I guess, when I'm using an operating system, the only reason why I need to do stuff advanced enough to have commands like that is if I'm configuring advanced settings, but once I have that all the way I want it, I don't regularly need to change it, and 99% of the time all I need to do is: play games, edit documents, open folders/files and programs, decompress files and install programs - just the normal stuff, all of which can be done just by clicking a few things, as has been proven by Windows. Not that it's hard to type (I'm doing it right now, after all), but I'm not likely to memorize and easily remember a whole bunch of commands (I have a terrible memory, btw), unless I'm using them all of the time, which like I said, I generally wouldn't be, so in that case it's just easier for me to use a GUI. When I'm programming in a full language, it's different, because how could I be expected to specify everything to do in thousands of lines of code using a GUI - some incredibly elaborate flowchart? And in that case, it's much easier to remember the commands because I keep writing so much code that I'm using the keywords ALL the time, and they're more intuitive anyway (like if, while, return, etc.). As for people who have trouble double-clicking, that sounds like a physical disability, and I don't think it would apply to most people, but in any case, they have accessibility options for those people.

I know about the .tar.gz stuff (and by doing both at once it works more like .zip I think), but I wasn't aware of those extra other compression formats. But I don't know why you'd need to store a huge file without a file system just to save that extra tiny bit of space (from what I understand, the space of the allocation tables and stuff is miniscule compared to the size of the whole drive).

Can anyone verify this for me? The following line:

git clone https://github.com/cilynx/rtl88x2bu

would just download all of the files that I would see if I looked at that URL in a browser, and put them all in a directory, right? Or if I'm wrong them please correct me.

But if I'm right, then wouldn't that mean that theoretically it would have exactly the same effect if I were to just go to that URL in a Windows browser, download every individual file into a directory, reboot into Linux, and copy that directory onto the Linux drive? Because if so then I might have a solution to my WiFi driver problem! Because that line happens to be the first of several which supposedly would enable me to install the driver that I need!

EDIT: But I hadn't looked at all the subdirectories, and it looks like there are a LOT of files :(

I remember reading a post somewhere about when somebody had to do that.

It's rare that you would ever need to do this, but one nice thing about Linux is that it's flexible enough to allow you to do this sort of thing if it ever does turn out to be necessary.

Linux has other nice tricks like that. For example, on my Raspberry Pi 4, I've mounted a tmpfs on ~/.cache/chromium in order to force the browser to store its cache in RAM rather than on disk, which reduces SD card accesses (and writes), and hence significantly reduces the amount of stalling I encounter.

(The Raspberry Pi 4 setup is one that seems to violate an assumption that web browser authors tend to make. They assume that the local disk is faster than the Internet, and I believe my Pi 4 is an example where that's not the case.)

It would have the same effect, but using git to download them would be *much* less work and much faster.

If you need to do the download from a computer that doesn't have git installed, you can just click on the green "Code" button and choose the "Download ZIP" option; this will give you a single .zip file, which you could then decompress with your tool of choice.

Alternatively, you could just find a way to install git on the computer you want to download from. Git is available for Windows and Mac OS as well as Linux. Alternatively, you could just use WSL (or cygwin), which will give you a Linux-like command line on Windows, and install git there.

You can do all those tasks in a Linux GUI.

However, if you e.g. asked me "How do I update all system files and applications which have been installed from repositories?", my answer would probably be:

Give two commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Instead of:

Look if you have a kind of shield icon on the task bar, and click on it.
If you don't see that icon for some reason, start the Update Manager or something that is named similarly from the start menu.
Click on Refresh.
Check the list that everything is selected.
Click on Install Updates.

And then I can't be even 100% sure if you have that shield icon in your desktop because I use Linux Mint 19.3 XFCE and you apparently use Linux Mint 20.x Cinnamon or Mate, so I am unsure if icons etc. are in the same places and everything named similarly.

We (the people) have just become accustomed in Windows that many things can be done only in the GUI, or if there is a way to do it the command prompt, no one is sure how to do it, and whether you should use PowerShell for it instead of the legacy Windows command prompt/CLI.