Just gonna drop this here incase you need it as it confused me to begin with

Kernel = core of Linux, pretty much every distro uses the same kernel and it’s got a lot of stuff built in (drivers, some command line utilities, etc)

Distro - built ontop of the kernel, the main parts that differentiate them are:

The package manager (how you install software, probably the most important part when picking a distro)

The desktop environment (the system UI, essentially just another program on Linux so it can be swapped out for another one if you fancy a change)

(There are also things called window managers which are basically just stripped down versions of desktop environments that tend to be far more DIY but also more customisable)

And the preinstalled packages, which for the most part are the same on most popular distros, plus with things like snap, flatpak and appimage dependencies are much less of an issue anyway

If you have any experience with programming and want to try something new and interesting I would recommend giving NixOS a go, your entire system is defined by one configuration file (you can split it into multiple files, but you decide how to do that)

Makes understanding and building a system so much simpler and saner, all the advantages of arch with none of the elitism