I use the Linux terminal quite frequently and practically live inside it.
I develop my applications with (Neo)Vim, which is a terminal editor. The reason is this: you achieve a sense of unity within the terminal, you can type away without lifting your hands from the keyboard, and all the tools that work with the terminal are at your fingertips (Yarn, Rails, Cargo, Docker come to mind). For instance, when using VS Code, I don't feel this unity. Yes, it has an embedded terminal, but it's never clear which directory it's working in or what's happening where. There's also a debugging system that makes me feel uneasy just thinking about it. A well-configured Vim with plugins installed is worth ten VS Codes to me.
Therefore, the terminal itself is like an IDE for me; I spend hours inside it. Naturally, what terminal to use also matters. Actually, I didn't used to care much about this—I would get by with KDE's Konsole. Konsole is slow but a nice application. But when I got my hands on Ubuntu... You can't install Konsole on this now. I tried to get by with Gnome Terminal. Oh dear lord—no font ligatures to show me proper equals signs instead of ==.
By the way, my relationship with Gnome has been rocky since Gnome 3 came out. Every now and then I try to install it and make myself like it, but it's futile—Gnome isn't for me. I had used what you now know as Mate (which was Gnome 2 back then) quite a bit, but to be honest, I only chose that because I got bored with KDE. Otherwise, for me, Linux is KDE, and OpenSUSE is what makes it properly usable. The thing is, my work computer came with Ubuntu installed from the factory, and I decided not to mess with it.
Actually, I wouldn't normally obsess over this, but something rubbed me the wrong way. Something cannot be both slow and impractical. It offers nothing extra, and on top of that, it has become something absurd by cutting down features. Was I going to put up with this? So I started looking for terminals. Apart from Konsole, I kept encountering eccentric terminals that made me wonder "Do the people who use these ever see daylight?" There's also Alacritty, which I knew was written in Rust and caught my attention, but it's feature-poor. Actually, Alacritty is a nice terminal, but it's focused purely on speed. It doesn't interest me. What I'm looking for is broad features like Konsole.
Then I encountered Kitty. Its slogan goes like this: "A fast, feature-rich, GPU-based terminal." It caught my interest. I installed it on the system, and I'll admit it felt bland at first. But it wasn't blander than Gnome Terminal. After some configuration, I realized how powerful it was. I had something useful that could transform in various ways.
Due to Ubuntu's ancient packages from Noah's time, I was deprived of Kitty's features for a while and settled for just styling it a bit. However, later I installed it using the automatic installation script from their website instead of installing through Apt and started using it. There were really beautiful features indeed.
First, I think it's one of the rare terminal options where you can navigate through outputs using Vim commands. Very interesting indeed. You can select just like the commands you enter in Vim, copy and paste. Its integration with the system shell is excellent, it even gets along wonderfully with Fish, Linux's rebellious child.
Another thing that caught my attention is that it can seriously open images within itself. It doesn't need any additional tools. It opens whatever you want right away. The beauty of this is that your need to exit the terminal is reduced even further.
You can add things to the plugin development library called Kittens by writing Python. It seems like something that could greatly benefit Linux installations consisting of window managers. And then of course we have Gnome, which can't even improve general usage quality as much as these installations. It literally created conditions so difficult that it made me find my own solutions. Thanks Gnome, thanks Ubuntu for making me wander among PPAs for everything current. You made me break out of my comfort zone.