As Neal Stephenson famously wrote, In the Beginning was the Command Line (updated by Garrett Birkel in 2004).
To make a long story much shorter, before graphical user interfaces with mice-controlled pointers, computers booted up with a prompt, where they waited for you to type something.
That interface is still alive today. Almost all servers contain nothing but. Your Linux desktop system also has a command line. Many of the same commands you might have typed into a Unix system in the 1970s and '80s will work today.
There is still tremendous utility in the command line. Some call it the console, the terminal, or the Unix prompt. They all describe the same thing.
A significant percentage of software developers prefer working with the command line and its thousands of text-based tools. For a lot of development, you really have no choice.
MacOS has a command line. So does Windows. The Mac's, based on the early Unix variant called BSD, is much like the command line at the center of Linux. Apple does everything it can to make sure the users of MacOS never have to open a terminal. There are GUI boxes and menus for everything you would ever need.
Yet the command line persists — and thrives — in MacOS. The Macbook Pro is the laptop of choice for legions of developers, even though Linux on just about any other computer offers most of the same programming tools, and many more. Of those, the Linux versions can be better and faster. I'm looking at YOU, Homebrew, the Linux-like package manager for Mac that couldn't be slower and which made me long for Debian's APT and even Fedora's DNF.
With Debian — and any Linux or BSD Unix system, you know what's in the tin, as the British say. (We Americans call it a "can," but the expression references a tin, so I'll stick with it.)
Before Windows — and definitely before Windows 95, there was MS-DOS, the Microsoft command-line system that many an office worker saw before they fired up Wordstar, Visicalc, dBase, Lotus 1-2-3 and even early versions of Microsoft Word. (I remember running MS Word on DOS 3.3 and 5.)
Like Apple, Microsoft would prefer that its users never touch the Windows command line, which can be summoned by searching for CMD. But now that the basic Windows CMD application has been joined by IT department favorite PowerShell, a new Windows Terminal, and even a full Linux console in the form of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, the command line is getting way more attention in Microsoft's OS than on Apple's Macintosh.
But why try to replicate what Linux can already offer you: A real Linux kernel running your system and available for almost any computing task.
I spent a couple years running Windows 10 with an Ubuntu system via the WSL. I couldn't manage any part of the Windows system with the Ubuntu shell, and sharing files between the WSL and "proper" Windows was inconvenient at best. Microsoft is actively improving the WSL. (They REALLY want developers to use Windows.)
After a couple of extremely troubling Windows upgrades that cost me days of productivity at a time, I thought, "Why am I fighting this?" I don't need Adobe or Microsoft applications. I got an NVMe M.2 SSD drive, installed Debian Stable on it and never looked back.
"In the Beginning Was the Command Line," Neal Stephenson https://smorgasborg.artlung.com/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml (Also available as a print or ebook)
"In the Beginning Was the Command Line," Neal Stephenson with 2004 update by Garrett Birkel http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html