Hello, fellow Linux users. I am new to really understanding the capabilities of a computer period. I was not getting the Windows operating system, and someone suggested I try learning one of the Linux programs. I am currently in a technical school for networking and based on personal investigation and discussions with my instructors I currently have downloaded Ubuntu and Fedora. So, my first question is where should I start in my studies to learn the Linux system? Thank you.

Hello and welcome to LQ!

For learning the graphical environment just use it for your everyday tasks, you will become more proficient over time.

For learning the command line I would recommend to have a look at these two links:
http://linuxcommand.org/index.php
http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html

For information about setting up a specific software, like a web- or file-server very good sources are the ArchWiki and the Gentoo Wiki, even if they are originally meant for other distros than yours.
Of course there are also literally hundreds of tutorials for every purpose on the net, a good starting point would be http://tldp.org/

Have fun with Linux!

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Echoing the comments above, the first step is to install it and use it. With Linux, a big difference for me has been that I have always used the command-line (terminal) much more often than I ever did on Windows. This is not so much because it was necessary, but rather because so many things are faster and easier in the CLI.

As you use a system, you will find for yourself what works best, but definitely take the time to learn some basic commands. At TLDP (linked above), I would start with the Bash Guide for Beginners.

If you want a deeper knowledge of the OS internals and how the entire Linux OS works you can give a try to some more 'vanilla' distros like Slackware or Arch. They tend to be simpler in learning its architecture as they mostly use config files for configuration and not some GUI configuration tools that are easy to use but hard to understand what's behind the scenes. Though they're more time consuming for regular everyday use than the mainstream distros like Ubuntu, OpenSuSe, Fedora, etc.

Not really true. You don't change the setup of your system every day, you do it only once and make possibly some minor changes from time to time. Firefox, Thunderbird, Open/LibreOffice, whatever are all the same across the distros.

Well, that was my experience at least. When I had been using Slackware (and Zenwalk later) (it was several years ago so my exp can be outdated indeed) I always had to face some issues at major system updates like KDE or something. Not to mention that most of the additional peripheral hardware installed required a bit of my attention. It was not not something utterly difficult or unsolvable but it did take some time and require a bit of googling that consumes time as well. So compared to my current Kubuntu/Debian installations Slackware/Zenwalk were more time consuming. I don't wanna say that any of those are better. I was pretty happy with Slackware actually, but at the moment I can't grant time to any OS installation unfortunately, and that was the point to abandon Slackware-based for me.

Where should you start? With a LiveCD distro like Knoopix. The advantage is it's fully functial and requires no installation to a hard drive, so you can mess with it as much as you want and you can't "break" anything. It runs entirely off the CD, and can cache the whole disk image to RAM if you have enough. It is a Debian based distro which makes it similar to Ubuntu. Once you mess around with it for a while, you'll have a better idea about Linux in general and can move on to a hard drive based distro. If you really want to learn linux in-depth then Linux From Scratch is a great way to go, though you really need competant working knowledge of how computers and software work.

One more thing.... If you haven't noticed already, when it comes to linux, everyone has a different opinion and they are almost always correct. That's why there are so many different distros and programs.... to suit nearly every style purpose.

You can search this forum for answers and of course post.

Also; the Ubuntu folks are really nice
http://ubuntuforums.org/

Good luck to you-

If you mean you've never used Windows, that could be an advantage. A lot of people who come to Linux from Windows expect everything to be the same, and find it difficult to adapt. You won't have that problem.

To have a taste of Linux/UNIX, give this a try: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/
Other links posted in here are coo, too.