From what I can understand, losing data would be too great a risk for you, so I think you won't learn easily, because you might be scared of exploring the syste

From what I can understand, losing data would be too great a risk for you, so I think you won't learn easily, because you might be scared of exploring the system. IMHO, the best way to learn is to try everything, there are many things to learn and you will learn most when making mistakes, I know I did. Very few of my mistakes compromised the data, and I made many mistakes while tinkering with Windows too. You can use distros like Ubuntu just like you use Windows without opening a terminal, and the risk of losing data will be minimal, just be careful while installing, learn filesystems, store data you don't want to lose in a separate mount point, maybe mount it read-only if you don't need to write to it. I made a lot of mistakes with GRUB bootloader. It was very frustrating, now I'm not afraid to use it and triple boot OSes, because there are many ways to recover, but they can be complicated and as a newbie, It'd be hard to do on your own.