To access the Software Manager, you will first need to open your menu found in the bottom left corner of your screen. Then you can search for the Software Manager or click on the Software Manager Icon usually found in the Favorites column on the left side.

Once open, the Software Manager will give you a few different ways to find apps (or programs) that you want to install. In the top right corner you will find a search bar where you can type in the name of a program you want to install. In the middle of the window, you will find the Editor's Picks which is a randomized list of popular programs. And towards the bottom you will find a set of Categories in case you know that you want to install a certain type of software, but aren't sure what the name of any Linux Mint-compatible software would be.

Using the search bar in the top right corner, we can type in the name of a program that we want to install and the Software Manager will automatically start finding programs that it associates with that name. This might mean that it will find the exact program that you type in, or it will find similar programs that also might interest you.

Generally, we suggest avoiding any programs that list themselves as a Flathub or Flatpak as these programs are isolated from the rest of your programs and won't be able to update the same way the rest of your programs will. They do tend to work right away, but can suffer from not getting the latest security or performance updates.

Once you find the program you are looking for, clicking on it will bring you to the information page.

This Software Information Page will give you a bit more to look at and learn about before installing it. The first thing you will see is an image of what the program looks like when it is up and running. You will also see a small set of detailed information about the software (e.g. download size, version number, and the type of software) as well as user reviews.

When you are ready to install the software, you can click on the green Install button located in the top right corner of your screen. Clicking on it will likely bring up a new window that asks for your password and confirms that you do want to install the program.

After typing in your password, you should see the install button be replaced with a Progress Bar labeled Installing....

And once the program has been installed, you should see a new red Remove button appear. This is one way for you to uninstall the program, should you ever want to do so. You can also uninstall programs directly from the Menu.

Speaking of the Menu, once your program has been installed, you should be able to find it in the appropriate Menu Category or by searching for it using the Menu Search.

You can add this program to your Desktop, Panel, or Favorites by right clicking on the app while in your menu, and then clicking the appropriate option. Note that is is also how you can remove the program, should you ever want to do so.

Left clicking on the program will open it, just like any other software. After a few moments, you should get a new window for your new program! Congrats - you just installed a new piece of software for your computer!

In the top left corner of your terminal, you should see some green text. This text contains two pieces of information that are very important when doing other terminal commands, but not as important for what we're going to do today.

The first portion of the text contains the User who opened the Terminal. In this case, our User is EDU. Then, the Terminal lists the name of the computer we're using. In this case, our computer's name is Computer. The Terminal separates the name of the User and the name of the Computer with an @ symbol. Then, everything is followed up with the ~ (tilde) and $ (dollar) symbols. Again, these aren't important for the following steps, but are important for other tasks.

This is the section where you will be typing in the Command that you want the Terminal to execute.

Here we're going to type out most of the command that we want our terminal to perform. We're going to install Spotify using the terminal as our example. We're going to type:

sudo apt install spot

And let's break down that command and see what all of the components are.

If we were to type sudo apt install spotify we would get an error that says "Unable to locate package spotify"

This is because just using the name of the software doesn't always tell the terminal all of the information it needs.

So, to find out exactly what it is we are trying to install, we're going to use a feature built into the terminal called tab-complete.

If there were only one option for software installations, then pressing the Tab key once would auto-complete the word that we were about to type. However, since there are multiple files that start with the word spot, then we need to press the Tab key twice. This will bring up a list of all the potential options for installation.

Generally, we want to look for something with the name of the software we're trying to install (in this case, that would be Spotify) and either the word installer or client. In the options that our tab-complete is showing, we can see spotify-client as an option, so that's what we'll use.

We can finish typing out our command like this:

sudo apt install spotify-client

After pressing the enter key on our keyboard, the terminal will search for the program called spotify-client and then ask us for our password. Notice that when you type in your password, the characters (letters, numbers, and symbols) will be hidden for privacy reasons.

The terminal will then begin downloading and installing the Spotify Client and get it all set up on your machine.

Once your computer is done installing any new software, it's generally a good idea to make sure the program is up to date. You can do this with the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

There are a couple of new commands in this setup, so let's go over those.

You may have noticed that we didn't specify updating or upgrading the Spotify Client, and that is because this command will update and upgrade all of the software on our computer. Effectively, this is the same thing as going to your Update Manager and clicking Install Updates.

Note that some updates will pause and wait for you to confirm that you do want to install these upgrades. In fact, your sudo apt install spotify-client command may have done this as well. If you ever want to tell the terminal to automatically say "yes" to these pauses, you can add -y to the end of the command. For example:

sudo apt install spotify-client -y

sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y