aymous coward couldn't be wronger.
Ubuntu makes you dumb. period.
your goal is to find a distro with good documentation. if you are 200% serious, I'd say start with openBSD. not Linux perse, but it's the only place where documentation issues are considered high priority bugs. also you will learn a lot more about best practices (the main reason I think the parent is being obnoxious as suggestion Ubuntu for someone who is clearly already abusing sudo more than he/she should)
also, I'd say 90% of /. started with slack ware, moved to red hat or debian based distros, then played with linux-from-scratch.
lastly, threat every choice as life threatening :-) ...installer asks you which file system? research the hell out of every option. do not install Linux pressing next-next-next-finish.