Do I need to use the command line?

Yes.

(Actually, you can do most things without the command line these days, but you really should use the command line whenever possible.)

Linux is a UNIX-oriented operating system (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s all you need to be able to say at parties), and UNIX is a keyboard-oriented operating system. (There was no concept of a window when it was developed.) So, it’s best that you have a crack at the command line and take a little time to learn a few things. In fact, you can get things done a lot quicker with the command line than you can through a window.

Advantages of using the command line

Power. In Linux, anything you can do in a window, you can do from the command line. But not everything you can do from the command line can be done in a window. This means that the command line is more powerful. (Of course, you can accidentally delete your entire system if you’re not careful. But you could spill coffee all over the machine and fry the main board, but you still keep a cup of coffee next to you am-i-right?)

Speed. Navigating the filesystem, moving things, backing things up, renaming things, all that business — much easier from the command line. Commands such as mv and cp are super awesome and you don’t have to drag and drop icons all over the place. (mv for ‘move’ and cp for ‘copy’.) Once you have a sense of the filesystem, which is set up like a tree, plus a few basic commands, everything falls into place. Trust me.

Knowledge. If you try to run something graphically and it fails, what happened? Well, you can browse the system logs, look around for messages, and so forth. Or, if you try to run the same thing from the command line, any errors will be reported there. So much simpler for troubleshooting.

Disadvantages of using the command line

Nope.