I'm sure you'll get lots of conflicting advice. There really is no high road that's better than the others. Although I've been using variations of Unix since

I'm sure you'll get lots of conflicting advice. There really is no high road that's better than the others. Although I've been using variations of Unix since Version 5 running on a PDP-11/45, I use an Ubuntu desktop system for everyday use. Simple because it is easy to keep up to date and works well both as a graphical environment and with the terminal. My setup includes 2 LCDs in landscape mode for graphical apps and a third LCD in portrait mode exclusively as a terminal with lots of open tabs. As for getting started, have a look at https://www.lifewire.com/beginners-guide-to-linux-4090233 https://www.lifewire.com/beginners-guide-to-linux-4090233. Then you just need to frequently refer to the man pages and the many other guides you will find with Google. https://unix.stackexchange.com/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/ provides reasonably high quality answers to many common and not so common questions. I recommend that you learn to use terminal commands well. As a pro tip, if you are using 'vi', CTRL-] is the same as ESC. When you get used to using that your speed will increase significantly. Oh, and remap the CAPS-LOCK key to be a CTRL key. You don't want to get RSI in your left pinkie.