Welcome to Gaia! ::

I think the best way to learn a *nix system ( or any system, for that matter ) is to learn the command line first. Once you know how to use the command line, the GUI will be a piece of cake to learn. The first thing you should learn ( if you don't know how to do this already ) is how to set up partitions on your hard drive. This is typicaly done using the fdisk utility or, my personal favorite, cfdisk.

The best distrobution to learn the command line in is Slackware. The problem, however, is that if you're just learning the command line, you might get a little lost. Most people have recommended getting Mandrake or SuSE. I've never touched either of them, mainly because after using Debian, I got sick of using packages ( Debian was dependency hell for me ).

My very first distrobution that I used just to get a feel for Linux was Knoppix. Granted, you can't learn too much from knoppix. But, as I said in the previous sentence, you get a good feel for it.

I think that codename shawn is right, I still consider myself a newb because I haven't gotten the command line down yet. Slackware is a really kewl distro, anyways, if you're iffy about it. try using Slax, its a liveCD based distro that boots from the cd so it doesn't need to be installed if you don't want to.