How to learn Windows? Years of pain and torture of course.

What to learn? Powershell, learn powershell.

Then as you follow along any guides or howtos for administrative tasks, try to search how to accomplish the same things in powershell. Take notes on your own powershell learnings. I keep all my windows administrative powershell one liners, scripts, and notes in the same digital notebook for quick reference and updating.

If you're already experienced with bash, like I was, learning powershell might be tough. As it was for me, I had trouble understanding why PS cmdlets seemed to hide data when piped... Format-table(ft) and Format-List(fl) help tremendously

Powershell remoting is still a pain in my ass in most places, I rarely use it.

There's a windows admins discord group that's pretty savvy I asked and learned a lot along the way there. https://discord.com/invite/winadmins

YouTube! Don't necessarily look for YouTube powershell windows videos. Just the necessary tasks through the GUI will give you the correct direction to begin converting a process to PS. Learn how other Admins process tasks by watching them. Especially if it's an often repeated task try converting some or all of what they do in the video into PS equivalent.

With all of that said knowing powershell doesn't really help recovering from disasters. Knowing how to install windows and recover data from borked systems is a task best learned through battles. So, absolutely set up VMs and installed all manner of versions you'll be working with...that way you'll have familiarity with when things go wrong in them. I've yet to install windows 11 in a VM but I did try to install a copy onto a surface tablet only to learn the hard way that do ing so leaves the tablet without the drivers necessary for using the keyboard and touchscreen...weird need a custom built image or recovery image, great fun.