Always good to hear
You've provoked a long response, but it's hopefully useful.
The gui in this case is called Gnome, theres various alternatives but that's one of the easiest to use and to customise. Have a look at the various 'applets' available for the panels, I'm quite fond of system monitor myself. Gnome is big, slow and slightly clumsy. I'm like that you're impressed with how quick it is, especially with it running from a cd. A minimal hard drive install running fluxbox (a sound alternative to gnome)will astonish you.
Under system, administration on the live cd you'll find a tool called partition editor. This is pretty obvious in how it works, I tend to set up partitions with this before installing. The installer itself uses a less flexible version of the same program if you select 'manual' when offered the choice. If you'd like more control, the alternate install cd gives you far more options. 10gb is rather more than you need, but the simplist install is 10gb in one partition, mounted on / (where / = root directory, the bottom of the directory tree)
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To linux, everything is a file. Literally everything. This gives you considerable control, for example if you set a seperate partition to /home during boot all your files and application settings are stored here. You can then break the system, reinstall without formatting this and bookmarks, gnome configuration, files on your desktop and so forth remain from before. You can also have /home on a different hard drive, say a usb stick. /tmp is temporary files, placing this in a ramdisk is trivial and quite good.
'sudo gedit /etc/fstab' will open a file which lists where things are mounted on boot. It'll have some things in it by default, for example mounting your windows directory on /mnt/windows if you set this up during installation. Just don't reformat it by accident
If you append
/dev/shm /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
it will mount /tmp on /dev/shm when you reboot or type sudo mount -a
/dev/shm is a ramdisk which by default dynamically resizes up to a maximum of half your total ram, and a good example of a useful feature which is present by default but needs 3rd party software in windows.
gedit is gnome text editor, looks a lot like notepad. nano is a console based one which I prefer. sudo means 'do as root' or 'do as superuser/administrator' and will ask you for the password you set during install.
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Your normal user isn't allowed to do anything destructive, so it cant reformat anything, delete files it hasn't created itself, can't even read some files. Root is allowed to do almost anything, and often wont ask for confirmation. Do not enter this, but rm -rf is remove, with options recursive and force. Running this as root is dangerous, as normal user unlikely to cause much harm. This is a distinct security advantage over windows, from threats foreign and domestic.
It's risky, but often 'permission denied' can be countered just by writing sudo first. Experimenting with this will initially lead to frequent reinstalls, but thats not so bad. You need to use sudo to reboot or halt the system for example.
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There are many commands, not surprisingly. Google has already offered thousands I suspect. I'll list a few of the ones I use most often
ls list contents of current directory
cd change directory
cp a b will copy a to be, e.g. cp /home/jon/tmp /home/jon/Desktop/temporary
rm will remove a file, rmdir will remove an empty directory
mkdir will make a directory
mv moves a file, this is used for renaming as well
tab will auto complete commands, so cd /home/jon/D then tab will take me to my Desktop
cd .. will go back a directory
cd ~/ will take you to /home/jon
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install flushplugin-nonfree msttcorefonts should give you flash and microsoft fonts
man 'command' or 'command --help' will you anything you might need to know about the command. Hit q to get back out of the manual.
Beyond these you can do more exciting things, like use | to pipe the output of one command to another. ls >> tmp will write the output of ls to a file called tmp, but ls | grep *.iso will search current directory for files matching *.iso and write this to the terminal, or ls | grep *.iso >> tmp will write all the iso files in your directory to tmp.
This is why each command tends to do few things, the system is made more flexible by permitting combinations. Basic administration tasks are made rather easier as a result, like moving mp3 files scattered accross your computer onto one mp3 player
example
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Run out of steam a bit, I think that covers enough to get you happily started. I spent weeks unable to get out of 'man mdadm' because I didn't know I was meant to hit q, had to keep closing and reopening the terminal. Good times.
Any questions you have, do feel free to ask.
Cheers
