You say that unix is confusing. Unix isn't confusing. It's just unfamiliar to you as it was to me at one point. The way you get better is that you push through the unfamiliarity and keep going until you solve the problem you're facing. Sometimes it's painfully slow to acquire the knowledge you need, but that's just part of the process.

All that knowledge accumulates over time and you build skills about how to learn new things.

That's what allows people to pick up new technologies easily. Hard work, previous experience with similar technologies, and some intelligence (which you obviously have already).

I would recommend that you install Ubuntu in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is a good choice) and see if you can get some Python programs running. That process alone will teach you a lot.

For what it's worth, RoR and the Heroku stack are not basic and you shouldn't feel bad for not picking the up quickly. There's so much context that you need to have to understand what's going on and to use those technologies effectively. I bet if you polled your classmates the majority of them haven't even heard of Heroku.