Do I have to type in all these horribly obscure commands?
Of course not. This is Linux, and hackers are lazy. The easiest way to enter any command you see is to simply highlight it with your mouse, then, without clicking anything, move your mouse over to your terminal window (aka console), and click once (left mouse button) to activate the window, then click down on the mousewheel, assuming you have that feature in your mouse. This will paste the entire thing you highlighted into the terminal, and, if it's a single line, all you have to do then is hit enter, and it will run the command.
The first thing you should learn about Linux like systems is that hackers and programmers are a lazy bunch of people, so there is usually some easy way to do things you have to do all the time.
You can also do this out of X, in the actual console, if you have gpm installed, which allows the mouse to work in console, out of X. This is a very useful feature, because you can actually copy something, say an error message, in one terminal, then change to another one (ctrl+alt+F2, for example), login, start nano or some other text editor, then simply click your center mouse button, and the entire thing you copied will appear, all without X running at all.