Playing Hacknet without Unix knowledge possible?

Solution 1:

Yes, absolutely. The tutorial will take you through everything you need to know, and the commands are not sufficiently complex to form anything even approaching the rich language that bash and the like can provide. Experienced shell users might enjoy seeing some of the names carry over (nmap, cat, ...), but it's nothing like the real thing. Indeed, I found it a bit frustrating that I couldn't use most of the features of my real command line in the game.

If you're interested in learning how to drive a real Unix shell, http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ is a fun place to start.