First of all Welcome Back!
Perhaps of more importance, I see that you, like me, still play with FreeDOS, which BTW includes considerable Linux and Linux-influences. Command Line Linux is just not that different from DOS. There are some excellent books available for those who find man pages a pita. O'Reilly publishes a score of great books but one I found 9and still find) essential is
Linux in a Nutshell which is simply a dictionary of command organized both alphabetically and also by type of "job", what they do. It displays all the possible switches and even gives examples of strings of switches. Hopefully you are aware that GUI is very useful for some kinds of work but for others CLI is more powerful and faster. One example would be editing Windows Registry where one wants to delete any reference to an uninstalled app. In GUI this takes forever. In CLI, at least in Linux CLI one single command and DONE! in fractions of a second! This is what awaits you - a combination of both so you can choose for yourself instead of accepting the dictates of Redmond who have a vested interest in keeping users dumb.
I highly recommend LiveCDs which allow one to try out distros with zero commitment or change to your existing system. Like you I started with Mandrake but a system upgrade failure soured me against auto dependency resolving. Thankfully at the time, nearly 20 years ago, I was in the habit of spending a lot of time on IRC and especially in Linux channels so I asked the guys I respected most and nearly all of them recommended Slackware "because it just compiles stuff right". That was just what I wanted to hear. Above al else I wanted stability and reliability and a system that would not try to do stuff for me, constantly underfoot, making problems far more difficult to even discover the source let alone the fix. There are lots of istros and live distros as you can see
HERE but I do recommend you give Slackware a try as it is quite unique. It takes care of the majority of dependencies by installing a LOT but all by design to fit smoothly together with the least deviation from Vanilla (which is why "stuff just compiles right"). Unless you choose to install a 3rd party installer it will never assume it or anyone else knows what you want better than you and that is both freedom and great protection.
If you have any interest the new full boat Live version can be found
HERE
Whatever you choose, welcome aboard and best wishes
