Honestly most of the people that approach me to learn Linux, I have them follow the Gentoo Handbook to compile and configure a Linux workstation from scratch.
This is what I did when I was about 14 on my pentium 4 to keep my room warm in winter and sleep with white noise.
It also worked great for me to understand where everything was in my install.
Unfortunately when the gentoo wiki got nuked like 12 years ago I was in the middle of a reinstall and so I couldn’t finish it and moved on to other things. Used arch for a while but it became my second job to keep it running and it wasn’t worth it. As things started branching out I no longer understand what’s what. Every time there is some drama over some decision some distro made I feel like I don’t know either. Wayland or no wayland, snap, etc.