Hi & WELCOME \gnu bie (try 6 libre? #4user)
(Ooops, MY [silly] ramblingS {has,have} begun!)

Slackware gets most LQ votes, tho I'm NuTyX - X

AncientUnix'er me loves your enthusiasm for CLI basics!
(Note links 'hidden' in this=my post, for web-research)

How about a 'raceGame' to see how FAST you can get minimal
grub to load a kernel &init a [busybox] shell prompt? WoW

Here's a VBox idea, in case your 64bit (NON-EFI?) scrapXP is 'alive'.

Anyways, looking forward to hearing about your Linux 'journey'!
And how many minutes (from NOW) it takes you to get TO a #prompt

p.s. My current favorite LQhowtoAdvice here. Best wishes for A on Thread!
(Re: >"BTW, being graded for a CS class on this ...")

1 members found this post helpful.

Great info all around! TY.

Be sure to set up your Linux in a virtual machine. I suggest VirtualBox, because it's backed by Oracle Corporation(!) and it's free.

Now, you can "play with Linux" without breaking anything concerning the host. (For what it's worth, I presently run all of my Linux setups on virtual machines of one sort of another, sometimes using externally-attached hard drives. I don't fool around with partitioning.)

You can also snapshot the virtual machine such that you can then restore from a previously-saved snapshot.

The simple reality is that most of the web sites you might visit today are running on virtual hardware.

Yeah, so I know that we shouldn't quote the entire post but this was so good I had to share it again. Thanks again Jjanel, you went above and beyond on this post. I had to draw attention to it for my classmates that check out this thread.

Thank you to all who contributed, I really appreciate the fact that people took the time to point me in a direction.

I started with Slackware. I did so because the first distro I tried to install I forget what it was did not install and I somehow stumbled over Slack. It was an accident, but a happy accident. Since then, I've used many distros--right now, I'm running Debian, Mageia, and Slack on hardware and several others in VMs--but, wherever I wander, I always come back to Slackware.

Slackware gives you a full environment out of the box with lots of installed programs and a choice of several desktops and window managers, and, when you want to install additional packages or make configuration changes, you will learn how to use Linux (not just how to use some GUI interface or other).