Vijay's first day without Windows
The mental shift — everything you know mapped to Linux equivalents
Vijay had 6 years of Windows production support experience. He knew Task Manager, Event Viewer, Services.msc, and PowerShell inside out. His company migrated everything to Linux and he had one week to get productive.
His manager said: Vijay, everything you know still applies. The concepts are identical. Only the tool names changed.
THE MENTAL MODEL: Linux is not a different world. It is the same world with different spellings.
WHAT YOU WANT TO DO WINDOWS LINUX
See running processes Task Manager ps aux or top
Kill a process taskkill /PID 1234 kill 1234
Check CPU and memory Task Manager top, htop, free -h
Check disk space File Explorer df -h
Check network connections netstat -an ss -tlnp
See open ports netstat -ano ss -tlnp
Check IP address ipconfig ip addr
Ping a server ping server ping -c 4 server
Check DNS nslookup server nslookup server (same!)
View a file notepad file.txt cat file.txt
Edit a file notepad file.txt nano file.txt
Find text in a file findstr "error" file.txt grep "error" file.txt
List directory contents dir ls -la
Change directory cd folder cd folder (same!)
Copy a file copy file1 file2 cp file1 file2
Move or rename a file move file1 file2 mv file1 file2
Delete a file del file.txt rm file.txt
Create a directory mkdir folder mkdir folder (same!)
View environment variables set env or printenv
Set environment variable set VAR=value export VAR=value
Run as administrator Right-click Run as Admin sudo command
Schedule a task Task Scheduler crontab -e
Check service status sc query servicename systemctl status servicename
Start a service net start servicename systemctl start servicename
Stop a service net stop servicename systemctl stop servicename
View event logs Event Viewer journalctl or /var/log
Check OS version winver uname -a or cat /etc/os-releaseThe first thing Vijay did was things he already knew how to do conceptually. He just needed the Linux spelling.
Check CPU and memory (same as Task Manager):
top # press q to quit, P for CPU sort, M for memory sort
htop # nicer version with colours
free -h # just memory, quick summary
uptime # load average over timeCheck disk space (same as File Explorer Properties):
df -h # all drives and partitions, human readable
du -sh /opt/* # like right-click Properties on each folderView a file (same as Notepad):
cat filename.txt # print whole file to screen
less filename.txt # open scrollable viewer, q to quit
tail -20 filename.log # last 20 lines
tail -f filename.log # live updates, like CMTraceFind text in file (same as Ctrl+F or findstr):
grep "error" file.txt # case sensitive search
grep -i "error" file.txt # case insensitive
grep -r "error" /opt/app/ # search all files in a folder recursively
grep -n "error" file.txt # show line numbersVijay's biggest realisation on day 1: Linux does not hide things behind GUIs. Everything is text. Once you can read text, you can automate anything.
Every Windows tool has a direct Linux equivalent — the concepts are identical, only the commands differ
Task Manager becomes top or htop, Services.msc becomes systemctl, Event Viewer becomes journalctl
grep is findstr, cp is copy, mv is move, rm is del, ls is dir — the logic is the same
sudo is Run as Administrator — prefix any command with sudo to run it with elevated permissions
Linux stores configs as plain text files in /etc instead of the Registry — easier to read and backup