Apart from actual system administration or kernel developing, there's no real "learn Linux" .

Video/Photo/Vector editing on Linux is not "learning Linux", it's learning to use a tool which runs on Linux. You can learn to use Blender, Gimp or Inkscape on Windows. You don't edit videos/photos/vectors with the Linux kernel. You can even "learn the linux terminal" installing bash on Windows.

You can also install Visual Code or IDLE on Windows and on Linux. Learning to code on Visual Code or IDLE is not really "learning Linux".

Also going on distro hopping looking for the "perfect distro" many times means the hopper simply doesn't stick to one long enough to learn how to customize the environment to their liking (which usually means the window manager).

Most of the things you can do on the GUI, even the administration ones are just layers and layers of tools to make things "easier" - and they'll be different on each distro and release. Command line administration will change much less, or at least less frequently.

Things I consider "learning Linux" are for example:

• installing Linux (specially a headless server)

• understanding how to use the package managers - again, on the command line

• understand how systemd works

• (hard core) dive into the kernel workings

• understand how grub works

• learn the general filesystem structure

• learn how to analyze logs

• learn user administration and how the permissions (and extended permissions) work

• learn how to integrate Linux to a Windows environment (join a workgroup or domain, share storage, authenticate users)

• learn how to check resources usage and how to troubleshoot it

• understand the nuances and of partitioning and when they are needed, as well as the different filesystems

• etc (and /etc)

And yes, many of those are not strictly "Linux", but are specific to a Linux system, unlike photo editing.

What is your end goal with this? Going for BSc in Computer Science / Engineering would enable you to become a developer / computer scientist.

Photo/video/vector editing seems very out of place in your plan. That's just another domain. If you're passionate about those visual arts, that's great and more power to you, but know they're not relevant for a computer scientist. Src: I've been there.

Regarding everything else you've said, it seems to me that you're learning stuff without a direction and just because you've heard those things (cs50 / linux), are important. I suggest you choose a moderately difficult task (game, app, tool, website, ehatever) that seems interesting for you to create, (install linux) and start working on it, and focus on finishing it. You'll learn a lot on the way and gain a broader understanding of how a project is pieced together. Most importantly, you'll figure out what you don't know, and thus eill have a direction going forward.

And don't get me wrong, you're right, you can gain a lot of valuable knowledge by going through cs50 or learning to use the linux terminal, but it's not really useful unless information, unless you apply it to a project.