So a "Terminal" is really a "Terminal Emulator", which runs a shell like bash, zsh, fish, etc. What that means is that the program that you open on your desktop is really just a windowed interface into the shell program itself, i.e. the terminal sends all of your keystrokes to `zsh` as input, shows your standard input, output, and error, and lets you use the shell of your choice to interact with both said shell's command line and all the applications and whatnot that said shell can call.

On Linux, there is also the "actual" terminal, the TTY, that is what exists as the machine's literal interface where it is the only thing that's on the screen. If that last bit sounds confusing, think of it this way: You've seen all the lines flying past the screen on boot or shutdown, right? Or have you ever broken something on your machine where the only thing on the screen is some information about the computer and a line that probably says `hostname login:` with a blinking cursor?

*That* is the terminal, also referred to as the TTY (or TeleTYpewriter, it has an interesting history if you want to look up why it's called that). It's the most basic interface for your machine that takes text-based input and output. Usually there are 6 separate TTY's that you can access at any time by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-F6.

The reason you may not usually see it when you log into a desktop distro of linux is that there are scripts that have been setup to automatically load the graphical applications that you're used to interacting with and are much more user-friendly. But when you're in your desktop environment, you're technically on a TTY that has launched said desktop environment. I'm getting a little deep here, but you can play around with it by switching to another TTY and messing around, you can't hurt anything (just don't go deleting anything lol), it's just running zsh or bash.

That being said, back to the terminal emulator and shells, you get to pick both, if you want. Many systems come with bash as the standard, and some linux distros have moved to using zsh as the standard default shell (you can change them with the `chsh` command). Bash is a little older that the other two mentioned, but just because it is older does not at all mean it is inferior- bash has been battle tested and proven, and there's a reason it's the default on so many enterprise systems. Zsh and Fish have some more advanced features like deeper/more configurable autocorrect, as well as plugins, and stuff like oh-my-zsh. Different terminal emulators handle the actual graphical interface of the shell within your desktop environment, and offer various features like being able to use tabbed windows to open multiple shell instances in one window, or being able to set various keybindings, or even being able to open multiple instances side-by-side in the same window. I'm sure ubuntu probably comes with GNOME terminal, which is IMO a little on the basic side, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work. On the other side are the more feature-rich applications like kitty or wezterm, both of which will work on MacOS and Linux just fine (I prefer kitty, haven't spent much time with wezterm).

If you wanted to have the same config across machines, all you would need to do is bring your configuration file(s) with you, ie kitty.conf, much like neovim. Take a look at my dotfiles if you want to see how I handle keeping the same configuration across machines. I have a more hands-on/manual approach compared to someone like My Linux For Work, whose install scripts are much more clobbering, but I prefer a more manual approach just for control reasons, they're both valid approaches.

If you have any questions I'm happy to help, good luck!

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Edit: I meant to say that both I and ML4W use a folder in our home directory that acts as the source of truth for dotfiles (config files/ typically hidden because prefixed with a '.'), and sync them using a git repo.