Complete newbie here, best version to install on old Windows 10 laptop

[needsunscreen1]

Well, on Linux your desktop is "normally" located under /home/"your username"/Desktop and not under /usr/*

Anyway, in your first post you asked about windows, so my first question would be, are you running hashcat in a Microsoft Windows environment or a Linux environment, as these have quite a huge impact on where your Desktop is located.

Second point, for security reasons you should never copy&paste any command line taken from the internet before you can read and understand what will happen when you execute this command

so first get yourself familiar with the command line interface your are using (bash or similar on linux, cmd or powershell on windows) and the programm you want to use (hashcat obviously)

the basic usage of hashcat is

hashcat [options]... hash|hashfile|hccapxfile [dictionary|mask|directory]

for options see wiki https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=hashcat

the website you stated describes very well what happens and what the options mean, but you still have to adapt some options to match your environment, you need to know where the dictionary you want to use is located and how its named, you need to tell hashcat these infos, on linux for example there is a difference between rockyou.txt and RockYou.txt as linux cares about these differences in lower/uppercase. (tabulator autocomplete is your friend)

I am using bash through Terminal on Mac OS, Ventura 13.7.2. as it is on a 2017 Mac. It is a newer computer than my old Windows laptop. So if using bash, does that make it a Linux environment or does that need to be installed or do I need Linux if using hashcat on my Mac? I feel like I would do good with some 1 on 1 tutoring to make sure I am starting correctly. 
I am feeling like I may need a 1 on 1 tutor, lol. High school geometry all over again...LOL

Oh, I just found a youtube video and was able to crack the hash of hash.txt using the rockyou.txt wordlist. Hopefully I will eventually figure out how to hashcrack a zip file and a rar file I forgot the passwords to. If I don't know a password or the length, do I search for or create a wordlist and start trying an attack?